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IISITED STATES OF AMBKICA.} 



FIRST 



Historical Transformations 



OF 



CHRISTIANITY. 



FROM THE FREl^CH OF ATHAKASE COQUEREL THE YOUNGER. 



BY 



E. P. EVANS, Ph.D., 

PEOFESSOK OP MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATUKE IN THE 
UNIVEKSITY OF MICHIGAN. 



" Ecclesia indiget reformatione." 



Savonaeola. . 



•^-> 



t BOSTONr.v . .0^- 

WILLIAM V. SPENCER, 

203 Washington Street. 
1867. 



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i 



d 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 

WILLIAM V. SPENCER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts, 



STEREOTYPED AT THE 

BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, 

NO. 4 SPRINO LANE. 



MONSIEUR LE PASTEUR 
MARTIN-PASCHOUD, 

HOMMAGE DE GRATITUDE POUR LA FERMETE ET LE COURAGE 

AVEC LESqUELS AUX DEPENS DE SA SANTE IL 

SOUTIENT DANS L'eGLISE REFORMEE 

DE PARIS 

LA GRANDE ET SAINTE CAUSE DE LA 

LIBERTE CHR:^TIENNE. 



PREFACE. 



*' As ten million circles will never form a square, so the 
united voices of myriads of men will never give the least 
reality to what is false." — Goldsmith. 

" 'TT^RUTH IS MIGHTY, AND WILL PREVAIL." ThlS 

-*- beautiful proverb has often been cited, without 
any indication of its origin. Struck by its simplicity 
and its lofty aim, we have wished to know by what 
author, and under what circumstances, the noble 
thought was produced. It is the conclusion of a sort 
of Oriental story, ingenious, like all those devised by 
the Arabs, but much more profound than they gen- 
erally are. We give it below in a brief abridgment. 

Three young men were watching around the bed 
whereon the king of the kings lay sleeping, after a 
magnificent banquet given by him to all the grandees 
of his court, and to the satraps of a hundred and 

(5) 



6 PREFACE. 

twenty-seven provinces of the empire. These young 
men belonged to the company of pages, or body- 
guard, v^ho received the vs^isest and most refined 
education at the prince's expense. In order to be- 
guile the weariness of the watch, one of them pro- 
posed to his companions to join in a combat of wit, 
such as is greatly enjoyed in Asiatic courts, because 
thereby the moments are sometimes made to pass 
more swiftly in the sumptuous and monotonous life 
of the seraglio. ''What is strongest in the world?" 
Such is the question which the page of Darius pro- 
pounds to his two comrades. It is agreed that each 
shall write his answer, and place it under the pillow 
of the sleeping monarch. When he awakes he shall 
be implored to judge the competition, and reward 
with a profuseness worthy of himself the author of 
the most satisfactory solution of the problem. 

The king, having awakened, consents to all that is 
asked of him, and promises to the victor a prize, the 
excessive richness of which recalls the Thousand 
a7td One Nights. The first competitor had written, 
" Nothing is stronger than wine." The second had 
allowed himself to be seduced into flattery : " The 



PREFACE. 7 

king," he had said, " is stronger than all else in the 
world." The third and last had given a twofold reply. 
At first, as though he had wished to continue the sport 
in the same tone with his fellows, he had declared 
that that which is strongest in the world is woman. 
But, rising to a much more serious order of ideas, he 
had added, '-^ That which always has victory over all 
things is truths 

Before awarding the prize, the king ordered the 
three competitors to appear before him, in the midst 
of a vast assembly of the court and the people, there 
to set forth and defend each his own opinion. 

The author of the story here gives four discourses, 
written in a satirical spirit, and an extremely piquant 
style, and much too bold to have been pronounced 
before the sovereign of the Asiatic empire. The 
language of the first three discussions is at once 
caustic and sprightly, contrasting strongly with the 
sober and lofty gravity which characterizes the fourth. 

" Truth is mighty and stronger than all else. All 
the earth proclaims the truth : Heaven itself blesses it. 
All things tremble before it, and fear it. There is no 
injustice in it. The truth abides; it is strong and 



8 PREFACE. 

powerful forever : it lives and reigns from age to age. 
There is in it no respett of persons, nor inequality : 
it does all things justly, and abstains from all unright- 
eousness and all malevolence. All approve its w^orks. 
It is strength, dominion, power, and majesty, in all 
ages. Blessed be the God of truth ! " 

These noble thoughts are enthusiastically applauded 
by the people, the grandees, and the king ; and it is 
then that the multitude cry out with delight, '' The 
trutJi is mighty ; it will prevail V^ It might be asked 
whether it is by design that the ingenious writer has 
caused this admirable sentence to be proclaimed, not 
by the prince or the courtiers, but by the popular voice. 

It is unnecessary to say that the champion of truth 
is crowned by King Darius, amid the acclamations of 
all. What is more strange is, that this victor, this 
man of intellect and faith, is an historical personage, 
a celebrated Jew, who makes haste to put his rising 
credit at the service of his exiled race, in order to 
obtain the freedom of Israel, and its return to Judea. 
Indeed, according to our author, the crowned com- 
petitor was no other than that descendant of David, 
that Zerubbabel, who brought back out of the cap- 



PREFACE. 9 

tivity of Babylon a great number of his brethren ; and 
thojeu d' esprit in which he shone had no other aim 
than the enfranchisement of his people. 

We do not counsel any one to receive this tale as 
veritable history. But it matters little. In this case 
the worth of the idea is of much greater importance 
than the authenticity of the frame in which it is pre- 
sented to us by the anonymous author of a Jewish 
book, written in Greek, just before the time of Jesus 
Christ, and known under the inaccurate name of 
III. Esdras.* 

This ingenious legend, of which we have here given 

* The book of Esdras here referred to is a compilation 
made during the century preceding Jesus Christ, by a Hellen- 
istic Jew, probably of Alexandria, and otherwise wholly un- 
known. In the Vulgate, which M. Coquerel follows, I. Esdras 
means the Canonical Book of Ezra, and II. Esdras means 
Nehemiah, so that his III. Esdras would correspond to what 
is known as I. Esdras in the Apocrypha of our English ver- 
sion, and his IV. Esdras would be our II. Esdras. In all the 
earlier editions of the English Bible there are four books of 
Esdras, as in the Vulgate. This was also the Hebrew arrange- 
ment. Our present classification, in which the Canonical and 
Apocryphal books are separated, was first adopted in the 
Geneva Bible of 1560. This story of Darius and the pages is 
also related byjosephus {Antiq, Jud. xi. 3), who, however, 
makes the king propose the questions to his three attendants, 
although the speeches and moral purpose of the legend are 
much the same. — Trans, 



lO PREFACE. 

onl}^ the principal features, will be found, with all its 
details, in the sequel of any old Bible, whether Catho- 
lic or Protestant. The part played in it by Darius 
and Zerubbabel, who were not even contemporaries, 
the four discourses, the wager of the three pages, all 
this is apocryphal ; there is nothing true in the story 
but the moral idea. It is thus that there occasionally 
comes to us from the East some marvel of jewelry of 
which the gold is not good, but serves, nevertheless, 
to enshrine splendid gems. Our readers will pardon 
us for having detached from its setting (at once ele- 
gant and barbaric), in order to offer it to them, a pearl 
of inestimable value, and of the purest brilliancy — this 
sublime thought, which is an appropriate epigraph to 
a serious and Christian book : ^'^Trzcth is mighty^ and 
will pi'evaiir 

But where shall truth be found? The church of 
Rome has borrowed from a monk this criterion : 
" The truth is what has been believed always^ eveiy- 
rivhcrc^ and by all. This is a wholly chimerical crite- 
rion ; the unanimity has never been absolute. So far 
as it exists, however, it is sufficient to demonstrate a 
common need of souls, a postulate of human nature ; 



PREFACE. I I 

but with reference to particular dogmas it has neither 
reaHty, nor authority, nor consistency. Many a doc- 
trine has been ahuost universally believed for centuries, 
w^hich subsequent generations have quite as universally 
rejected. 

Before employing synthesis it is necessary to have 
made use of analysis. It is necessary to have studied 
human opinions in order to form understandingly a 
body of doctrine. This is historical research ; and in 
matters of history, as in all things else, there is noth- 
ing fully real and living except w^hat is individual. 
All that is collective is, in some degree, conventional 
and fictitious. Societies, churches, nations, races, 
form themselves after their kind. It is in the indi- 
vidual that is found, not w^ithout modification, but in 
reality, the primitive fact, the idea of God. 

Our age is deficient in individualism, especially 
throughout France. The pantheistic tendency is 
universal ; it has rendered real service, it has coun- 
teracted certain narrow and superficial notions with 
which the French mind had been too long content, 
and which, for example, have rendered the theology 
and the philosophy of Bossuet entirely unacceptable 



12 PREFACE. 

to modern thought. But pantheism is, in itself, an 
enormous error ; and, besides, it commits the incalcu- 
lable wrong of relaxing individual energy, that sole 
spring which gives impetus to all that is great and 
strong in humanity. The world needs that souls 
should learn anew what they have too much for- 
gotten, namely, that they are responsible, endowed 
with will, charged with duties, and bound together by 
mutual interests, because they are free. To impress 
upon characters a new and better stamp, to ripen them 
for the future, ought to be the aim of all those who 
have a mission to teach and to enlighten. 

The old Huguenot individualism has, perhaps, some- 
what to say on the questions of the age ; it will be 
able to fulfil this trust the more thoroughly, and will 
be under the greater obligation to do it if it is at 
once enlarged by the scientific spirit, and tempered 
and enriched by the varied culture of modern times. 
It has long ascustomed itself to fear neither problems 
nor struggles. It wishes for no stronger support than 
firmness of conviction, and for no other weapon than 
freedom of investigation. With these two forces what 
weight could not be lifted? • 



PREFACE. 13 

For our own part, notwithstanding the presence of 
aids so powerful, we have endeavored in this work 
to confine ourselves to the firm ground of history ; 
there is no other soil more strong or more fruitful ; 
our fathers have sowed all that we are reaping, and 
our sons will gather only what we are now sowing in 
their own field. 

Religious history is poorly understood among us. 
The church, like the court, has its official historiogra- 
phers ; and the first condition of learning its history is 
to deny not only its pretended infallibility, but also its 
delusive unity. The very idea of Orthodoxy is a fiction 
radically false, a pretension which cannot be estab- 
lished. In the sense attributed to this word there is 
no orthodoxy but truth : but truth is the monopoly of 
no one, and has no need of this title of school or of 
sacristy. It suffices it to be called truth. Let us dare 
to know: let us reestablish facts, and reason upon 
what is, not upon what any autliority wishes to make 
us believe. 

It is in this spirit that we have undertaken the fol- 
lowing study upon the origin of different Christian 



14 PREFACE. 

churches, and on their transformations during the first 
centuries of their existence.* 

It may be that believing but timorous souls will 
reproach us for having spoken the truth upon delicate 
points ; for having overturned respectable fictions, and 
thus added to the troubles of doubting minds. Such 
reproofs w^ill have no influence with us. We respect 

* There is a group of critics to whom this volume will open 
an ample career — those who have excited against us certain 
passions, by affirming, now, that we no lo7iger believe i7i the 
living God ; again, that a sermon which we preached and 
published, under the title of Elan vers Dieu^ is directed 
against prayer; finally, that we are pantheists; while in 
reality, individualism — that is to say, everything in the world 
that is most contrary to pantheism — is our point of depart- 
ure — our method. 

Such persons may continue to attribute to us opinions 
diametrically opposed to those we really hold*; we know of no 
means of avoiding unjust suspicions, nor of enlightening, in 
spite of themselves, minds little disposed to comprehend what 
differs from their own narrow point of view. We may even 
say in their favor, and with all sincerity, that their habitual 
prejudices, the feebleness of their perceptions, and their slight 
acquaintance with the great problems which they treat so con- 
descendingly, lessen in our eyes the gravest wrongs which 
they commit. We neither defy nor fear them. We should 
not, we cannot, take their accusations into account. They will 
continue for a long time yet to injure and do evil, which is 
always easier than to do a little good ; but their assertions, 
not being based upon truth, will finally fall to pieces of their 
own weight, like all that is false. 



PREFACE. 15 

sincerity and seriousness of convictions, but not errors 
and abuses. Our age has its work to do ; and in this 
general work each has his personal task. We have 
no right to be silent ; and what encourages us most 
powerfully to speak is a thought recently expressed 
with great brilliancy and depth by one of our most 
venerated friends — M. le pasteur Buisson, president 
of the Consistory of Lyons : — 

" The Christianity of men has always hee^i pro- 
foundly inferior to the Christianity of God; the 
most fearful crises which have shaken or ingulfed 
thefrst^ have been for the second only a reitascence 
a7zd a rejuvenation^ 

Athanase Coquerel Fils. 



CONTENTS 



Chap. Page 

I. The Law of Transformation applied to the 

History of Religions 19 

II. Before Christianity 31 

III. The Christianity of Jesus Christ 60 

IV. Christianity and the Law of Transforma- 

tion 82 

V. JuDAicAL Christianity 91 

VI. Hellenistic Christianity 103 

VII. The Christianity of St. Paul iii 

VIII. The Christianity of St. Peter 139 

IX. The Christianity of St. John 150 

X. Roman Christianity 168 

XI. The Christianities of the First Fathers of 

the Church and of the First Heretics. 196 

XII. The Christianity of Constantine 217 

XIII. Conclusion. . 254 

3 (17) 



FIRST HISTORICAL 
TRANSFORMATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE LAW OF TRANSFORMATION APPLIED TO 
THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS. 

**One of the purposes of Divine Providence in permitting 
its holy church to be agitated, as we see it, by so many 
troubles and tempests, is to awaken pious souls by this con- 
trast, and to rouse them out of idleness and sleep." — Mon- 
taigne, Essats, B. II. ch. xv. 

I. 

NO one in our days can deny that the majority of 
minds are taking an intense interest in the dis- 
cussion of religious questions. These grave problems, 
for a long time despised or lost sight of by our predeces- 
sors, and perhaps by ourselves, now obtrude upon all. 
Also the equilibrium between the adherents of the 
different religions into which the human race is di- 
vided, is broken up. In Africa, Islam has resumed 
its career of conquest, and is receiving into its bosom 

(19) 



20 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

numerous idolatrous peoples, which it initiates into the 
knowledge of one God. 

In North America, Protestantism, free from all tram- 
mels of the state, divided into rival sects full of vigor, 
is invading the deserts and the forests, creating popu- 
lous cities, and attracting numerous immigrants, the 
majority of whom, with the second generation, embrace 
the reformed faith. It is easy to predict a vast and 
rapid progress for these hardy pioneers of civilization 
and religious liberty, now, at last, delivered from the 
degrading incubus of slavery. 

But it is not in the change of numerical ratio be- 
tween the adherents of different religions, it is in the 
interior of each cultus^ that the movement of our epoch 
is manifested with the greatest force. Catholicism 
has never before asserted itself with so much author- 
ity ; for Pius IX. is the first pope who alone, and with- 
out consulting a council, has ventured to add a new 
dogma to those which the Romish church obliges its 
members, under penalty of damnation, to believe. 
But, on the other hand, never has the authority of the 
church been combated with so great brilliancy and 
success, by thinkers so earnest and careful to discrim- 
inate between the religious idea which they respect 
and the Catholic forms in which they have been edu- 
cated, and which they now attack. 

In fine, the gravity of the political crisis through 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 31 

which the papacy is passing, cannot be hidden, nor 
overlooked. 

Among Protestants the struggle is not less ani- 
mated ; whether among those who cling as closely as 
possible to the principle of authority, or those who 
believe that God speaks to them more directly by the 
voice of their conscience than by the church or tra- 
dition, the letter or the dogma. The same contest is 
going on among the followers of Calvin and of Zwin- 
gle, in whose eyes all ministers of the gospel are 
equal ; and it affects likewise the Episcopal hierar- 
chies of Germany, Scandinavia, and England. Evi- 
dently the question is more profound and more gen- 
eral than all the diversities of ecclesiastical government, 
or the shades of official creeds. 

Some superficial observers, in watching the break- 
ing up of all religions, might imagine, perhaps, that 
these are near their end, and that their prestige is 
lost. This may be true as regards special forms of 
the religious sentiment, special ecclesiastical establish- 
ments ; but to believe that religion will cease to exist, 
is to believe that man will cease to be man. 

If the hopes of the adversaries of all worship do 
not appear to us well founded, if we consider the dis- 
quietudes which trouble many pious souls as betray- 
ing a want of faith and a lamentable weakness, it 
nevertheless remains certain that the religious crisis 



22 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

of our age is universal, deep, inevitable, and that 
none of the existing religions v^ill issue from it ex- 
actly as they entered into it. Each w^ill lose much, 
or will gain still more. 

Every being capable of thought is under obliga- 
tion to render to himself an account of the great 
facts v^hich are accomplished in the consciences of 
men, and which science would in vain attempt to 
pass by with indifference. Catholicism in France no 
longer succeeds in interdicting to simple laymen the 
study of these high and delicate questions. Protes- 
tantism openly attributes to each human soul the 
sacred right, the imperative duty, of judging for itself. 
In this respect all the members of the church as well 
as its ministers, woman as well as man, the people 
not less than the rulers or counsellors, share the com- 
mon responsibility. Even those who declare them- 
selves ignorant of, or indifferent to, all religious senti- 
ment, are by no means uninterested in this great 
process, since the majority of their fellows do not 
agree with them. To such an extent does the reli- 
gious question mingle in all others. The modern spirit 
sees it from afar, awaits it at the end of all avenues, 
stands before it like an immortal Sphinx before a 
new (Edipus. A man may solve well or ill the prob- 
lem of the age, but he cannot ignore it. His only 
means of escaping it would be to abjure thinking; 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 

and even then, having taken refuge in an utterly 
material life, he must still endure the consequences 
of tliought in others ; he must receive the terrible 
recoil of opinions and acts in which he has no parti- 
cipation. 

II. 

What frightens most minds is the immensity, the 
abstract vagueness, of religious knowledge ; but this 
is only a prejudice. Not in religion any more than 
in other matters is it permitted to reason vaguely, and 
to build an edifice without giving it solid foundations. 
The theology of the middle ages was a baseless 
science, of which all the conclusions were imposed 
in advance, and which had a right to seek and find 
only what was prescribed to it. 

Bacon taught the human mind the experimental 
method ; already dimly foreseen and proclaimed by 
an illustrious artist, too little known as a thinker 
— Bernard Palissy. 

Descartes endeavored in vain to except religion 
from the scientific method which he applied to every 
other subject. This exception, this pretended respect, 
which consists in protecting religion from discussion 
under the pretext that it is too sacred, is a real out- 
rage, whether voluntary or not, done either to religion 
or to the human mind, or, rather, to both at the same 



24 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

time. In our days men begin to comprehend this 
truth ; and a new science has been recently formed 
for the application of the experimental and historical 
method to the different religions. Already certain 
analogies have been established between the co7nfar'' 
ative history of relig-ions and that of languages — 
analogies which will mislead science if it exaggerates 
them, but which, if strictly observed, and confined 
within their natural limits, have given, and will con- 
tinue to give, most important results. 

III. 

The first fact that presents itself as general and con- 
stant in the study of religions is, that they are being 
incessantly modified. This might be presumed, since 
there is nothing in this world which does not change 
continually ; since it is a universal law of material 
and of moral nature that nothing is immutable except 
the absolute.* 

Several religions, it is true, have declared them- 
selves absolute ; and there are still minds sufficiently 
irrational to believe and to repeat that the true reli- 
gion is necessarily absolute, and that a religion which 
should not claim to be so would be no religion. 
These specious formulas have, in reality, no sense, 

* Vita Dei non fluit : stat. (Pierre Dumoulin, de Cogni. Dei.^ 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 25 

and refute themselves. For what is religion? It is 
the relation, or, if you choose, the totality, of the real 
or imaginary relations, of the human soul to the 
Divinity w^hich it adores : in other words, religion is a 
relation of the finite being called man, to the infinite 
being called God or Jehovah, Jupiter, Allah, or Brahma. 

Now, a relation between the infinite and the finite, 
between the absolute and the contingent, cannot be 
itself infinite and absolute, since it would not then be 
accessible to a finite being. God is indeed absolute ; 
but the notion which we have of God is necessarily 
imperfect, because we are not absolute. Every thought 
derived from God can neither be conceived by a human 
mind nor translated into human language without 
losing the character of absolute truth, and becoming 
relative truth. 

Besides, what is absolute does not change ; and the 
positive proof that no religion is absolute, and con- 
sequently infallible, lies in the fact that all, without 
exception, are constantly undergoing a process of 
modification. 

It is a law of history that every religion is being 
transformed continually and naturally, in order to 
respond to the spiritual wants of those who profess 
it. So long as a religion lives, that is to say, so long 
as it is really the belief of souls, their manner of 
being and feeling, it becomes transformed in spite of 
all that can be done to keep it immutable. In sacer- 



26 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

dotal religions an essential obligation imposed upon 
the clergy is, to prevent the religion from changing ; 
and the ministers of most forms of worship bind 
themselves together in this respect by the most solemn 
oaths. Most frequently, however, it is in themselves 
that the necessary changes are first effected and mani- 
fested. 

As the aim of religion is to unite souls to God, the 
fact that souls hope to unite themselves to Him more 
truly outside of a specific church or specific dogmas, 
suffices to prevent pope, or bishop, or priest, or pas- 
tor, from resisting the public conscience ; this con- 
science asserts itself without regard to them, and 
religion proves that it is living by modifying itself 
in spite of its ministers : God testifies against the 
priests in the souls of the people. 

When a religion is dead, — that is to say, when the 
consciences of its adherents have passed beyond it, — 
it is no longer susceptible of transformations. After 
the death of the Greco-Roman polytheism, there was 
a strong endeavor made by a school of philosophy, 
a great political party, a learned and powerful emper- 
or, to galvanize this great corpse into renewed activ- 
ity. In vain did these strive to resuscitate the pagan 
myths by ascribing to them an allegorical value. For 
that which has ceased to live there is no further met- 
amorphosis, and the stifled chrysalis will never be- 
come a winged being. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 2*] 

IV. 

Let us return to the successive transformations of 
a living religion. These can be varied infinitely, but 
among them two orders of opposing facts must be 
distinguished. Every religion v^hich exists has a 
reason for existing, an essential principle which has 
constituted it, a germ which lives in it. One can 
even affirm that, as an ensemble of ideas radically 
false can subsist only in the mind of a madman, so 
every religion contains a portion of truth, and re- 
sponds to something which is real, whether rightly 
or wrongly comprehended. 

Now, the successive modifications which are effected 
in religions are necessarily either in harmony with, or 
contrary to, the generating principle and foundations 
of these religions. A religion may change by devel- 
oping in conformity to its principle, and to the reality 
of things ; it is then in full progress. It may also 
vary in departing from its essential principle, and from 
what it possessed of truth ; then it falls away, and 
injures itself. But this is not all : religious questions 
and the situation of minds are so complex that the 
same religious transformation may present this two- 
fold character, and contain at once elements of puri- 
fication and of decadence ; not indeed in perfect equi- 
librium, but in such proportion that it would be very 
inexact to perceive in the new form of an ancient 



28 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

religion only a retrograde or a progressive movement. 
There exist such a prodigious fecundity and rich 
variety of ideas and sentiments in the vast sphere of 
religion, that one belief can differ from another with- 
out being absolutely true or false, and may deserve 
to be studied and respected for the nev^ view^s, the 
new manner of being and feeling which it brings to 
the common treasure of truths and virtues from which 
humanity is nurtured. 

This is why, in our wish to labor as historian, and 
not sectary, and desiring to apply the experimental 
and historical method to the Christian religion, we 
have not entitled our study a history of the deviations 
of Christianity, nor a history of its developments or 
progress, but have preferred the w^ord transforma- 
tion^ which is really scientific, because it prejudges 
nothing, and establishes only the fact. In our eyes, 
Catholicism, the Greek or Russian church, aiid Prot- 
estantism, are three transformations of primitive 
Christianity. If each essays to prove that it is a legit- 
imate development of the same, we shall be able to 
discuss this point, which remains to be examined ; 
but if one of the three pretends to be primitive Chris- 
tianity, we shall easily prove that it is deceived, and 
wishes to deceive us. 

The histor}^ of the transformations of any religion 
whatever would be interesting and instructive ; that 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 29 

of the successive modifications of our own religion Is 
of much greater importance to us. In a period of 
crisis, when each one is called, in spite of himself, to 
take some active part, this study is a duty for every 
serious and sincere mind. 

In France nothing is more generally unknown than 
the history of Christianity. The Catholic church, 
claiming to be immutable, Is placed, by this preten- 
sion, outside of the history of the essential conditions 
of all serious knowledge. Protestant orthodoxy is 
scarcely better situated to see the facts as they are ; it 
presents them under the false light which an exclusive 
doctrine projects upon the past, as upon everything 
else. 

Voltaire and his school wrote the history of the 
church without wishing or being able to comprehend 
it. Everything was good that would serve to crush 
the wretch (ecraser Vinfame), Voltaire took from 
all sources whatever could aid the triumph of his 
cause. Montesquieu has justly accused him of writ- 
ing history, like a monk,ybr the glory of his convent. 
France does not possess a single thoughtful and truth- 
ful history of the church. Without undertaking so 
immense a task ourselves, let us try to perceive the 
most essential facts in their diversity and in their spon- 
taneity, as they present themselves, each in its proper 
character ; let us guard against the spirit of system, 



30 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS. 

which refers everything to a preconceived idea ; let 
us prefer by far the inevitable inconvenience of leav- 
ing many things unexplained, to the inexcusable v^^rong 
of perverting facts in order to make them fit into our 
conventional framework ; and without renouncing our 
right to possess convictions of our own, let us firmly 
maintain, as still superior to this right, the sovereign 
and sacred prerogative of truth. 

It is impossible to understand anything of the trans- 
formations of a religion without knowing well its 
point of departure : we will devote to this subject, as 
one of great importance, a chapter entitled The Chris- 
tianity of yesus ChiHst, But one has not compre- 
hended a religion until one has become familiar with 
what preceded its foundation ; until one can compare 
it with its antecedents, and see wherein it resembles 
certain of these, and in what it differs from each and 
from all. This will be the object of the rapid but 
indispensable survey which we shall attempt in the 
following chapter. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 3 1 



CHAPTER II. 

BEFORE CHRISTIANITY. 

" Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I 
unto jou." — 6"/. Paul, 

I. 

THERE are religions whose well-known origin is 
to be attributed to a certain people, or even to 
an historical personage, to some strong individuality 
whose impress it has preserved ; but no one has 
created religion in the broadest and highest sense of 
the term. The religious sentiment is one of the essen- 
tial faculties of our soul ; like the sense of the true 
or the beautiful, like moral consciousness, or the need 
of affection. There is in man something which aspires 
to the Infinite. He is conscious of a secret afhnity 
with the absolute Being ; and this sentiment is devel- 
oped in proportion as he discovers by how narrow 
limits his own being is circumscribed. This contrast, 
more or less clearly conceived, between the bounds of 
our nature and the divine greatness, and the depend- 
ence of man in relation to unknown but superior 



32 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

forces ; the need which he experiences of discovering 
his own origin, and still more of foreseeing his own 
future ; in short, the solemn spectacle of the splendors 
and the wonders of nature, all move him to seek God. 
Man deifies and adores the first thing he meets rather 
than cease to adore. 

As there is no one of our faculties of mind or of 
heart which at times may not be conscious of its lim- 
itations, and suffer from that consciousness, so the 
aspiration towards the Infinite, the need of shaking 
off' importunate trammels, are common to them all ; 
also the religious sentiment has its seat in the very 
centre of our moral being, and, if we may be allowed 
the expression, lies at the root of all our faculties. 
Thence it results that if this sentiment is developed 
healthily it ennobles the whole nature ; it impels for- 
ward and upward all that it finds in us ; it becomes 
the soul of all progress. Nothing is more false than 
the wide-spread notion which w^ould make religion 
the enemy of progress, a check upon the free scope of 
human forces. On the contrary, it is the greatest 
expansive power in the world. 

But precisely because it is so, the religious sentiment 
cannot be perverted without falsifying and corrupting 
the whole soul. It is in the name of distorted and 
vitiated religion that the most atrocious cruelties, the 
most hateful perfidies, and the most revolting acts of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 33 

impurity have been perpetrated. Religion, turned 
from its aim, and, so to speak, taken against the grain, 
has served as a sanction of all that is most abject in 
servility, and most detestable in tyranny. 

II. 

Those who, terrified by all the evils advised or 
approved by infamous religions, have chosen to live 
w^ithout religion and to preach atheism, are as unrea- 
sonable as if they should renounce speech because 
mankind, from the beginning of the world, have not 
ceased to lie and to seduce. 

The dreadful dangers, the catastrophes to which we 
all expose ourselves in making use of the immense 
force which results from the generation of steam, do 
not hinder any reasonable man from trusting to a 
locomotive his own life, and the lives of the pe'rsons 
who are dearest to him. There is nothing less philo- 
sophic and less wise than to suppress the use in order 
to prevent the abuse. It is the error of the monks with 
regard to the world, as it is of real or pretended 
atheists wath regard to religion. The well-balanced 
man is neither monk nor atheist ; he is religious, and 
he does not exile himself from the bosom of society ; 
he abjures neither man nor God. 

To tell the truth, we doubt somewhat whether there 
has ever existed a real atheist. Because a man hates 

3 



34 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

the priests, which is often very just, he assails God, 
which is SLiperhitively absurd ; and not being able to 
injure Him, he denies Him. Men think to suppress 
the frequently-pernicious influence of the clergy by 
denying the action of God upon the soul ; but this 
calculation is false. Many scholars claim nowadays 
that the Buddhists, who are more numerous than the 
sectaries of any other religion, have no God ; but 
their atheism does not prevent their being oppressed 
and plundered by an immense multitude of monks 
and priests. It is impossible for the human soul to 
deny the Infinite, which presses upon and surrounds 
it on every side : it strives in vain to escape this con- 
sciousness. 

In the sixteenth century, Catharine de Medicis, a 
worthy pupil of Florentine scepticism, could not 
resolve to become either Catholic or Protestant, or 
even Christian, but indemnified herself for the absence 
of a creed by studying the pretended occult sciences, 
and allowing herself to be duped by astrologers. In 
our day many persons of little religious faith believe 
in animal magnetism, and consult rapping spirits or 
tipping tables ; and the confidence which they boast 
of withholding from the ministers of every form of 
worship they give willingly to mediums and clair- 
voyants. 

Moreover, even should the atheism of a few be 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 35 

plainly demonstrated, it would prove no more against 
the universal religion than the blindness of some un- 
fortunate persons proves against the light. There are 
all kinds of anomalies in nature. The religious 
element may be wanting to a soul, just as different 
members may be wanting to a body. Besides, the 
influence of education in the development of our 
moral being is so important that it can scarcely be 
exaggerated. All the powers of the soul, like those 
of the body, are formed only by exercise. Education 
has killed the religious sense in many minds, and that 
in two ways ; with some it has perished by atrophy, 
by absolute want of nutriment ; in other cases it has 
been destroyed by excess of observances and formulas, 
which have satiated and overwhelmed it. If atheists 
are made anywhere, it is in the convent. Young 
Voltaire had the Jesuits for masters, and the sons of 
austerely pious parents become most frequently liber- 
tines. It was inevitable that the rigorous and super- 
stitious observances practised by a Maintenon should 
bring in, if not a regency, a Louis XV. and a crowd 
oi roues — at least an iinmoral and irreligious reac- 
tion. Great and severe lesson which history gives us, 
and by which we are bound to profit ! The exaggera- 
tion of the true is nothing else than the false. One 
can go beyond the goal even in morality ; one can 
cause that upright consciences shall revolt against a 



36 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

God unfaithfully represented ; one can extinguish in 
men the glorious thirst of heaven, and of the infinite, 
by watering it to satiety, even w^ere it w^ith truths the 
most pure and the most beautiful. 

III. 

Religions are modified according to the nature and 
intensity of the aspirations of souls towards the Infinite. 
If universal religion is the relation of the human soul 
to the Infinite, each particular religion is this relation 
as it is conceived and expressed by a certain people, a 
certain society, or a certain founder. Some religions 
have grown up, like languages, without any known 
author, not bearing the impress of any individual will 
— collective and anonymous works, in which all have 
taken part. Elsewhere arises a man of genius or of 
faith, who comprehends and shares the wants of the 
souls belonging to his time, and gives them satisfac- 
tion. But never does his work remain identical with 
its first foundation. If the leader is too far in advance 
of his age, his followers necessarily retrograde to a 
form less elevated and more generally acceptable. If, 
on the contrary, the creator of a religion stands nearly 
on the same level as his century, he is soon surpassed. 

When a people has developed continuously and har- 
moniously, it presents the beautiful spectacle of a reli- 
gion which, from gross and unshapely beginnings, has 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



37 



gradually purified and ennobled itself by keeping pace 
with the civilization and moral culture of its vota- 
ries. Such is the interesting and instructive history 
of that religion which preceded Christianity among the 
great majority of civilized nations — the polytheism of 
Greece.* 

History, ascending, by a bold and happy effort, be- 
yond the times usually called historic, has fixed the 
origin of this polytheism. The Aryans, who came 
from India, and established themselves on the shores 
of Greece, adored only the forces of nature, and its 
most splendid and appalling phenomena. Thunder, 
lightning, light and fire, water and the tempest, have 
been the first gods of many nations ; and this is natu- 
ral, not only bec'ause the objects surrounding man en- 
gage his earliest attention, but also because he realizes 
his insignificance and dependence in the presence of 
the convulsions of nature. It is from them that he 
first learns his own weakness, and the greatness of ex- 
traneous powers. The Hindoos who came to Greece 



* Alfred Maury, Histoire des Religio7is de la Grece antique. 
We will not occupy ourselves in this place with the religions 
professed by Hindoos, Germans, and Parthians ; these had no 
direct action upon Christianity at its origin, nor did they take 
any part in the general intellectual movement at the time when 
the church was formed. If the religions of India have exerted 
any indirect influence, it is solely through the medium of the 
polytheism or of the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans. 



38 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

adored, among other meteorological divinities, a god 
restorer, whom they called the Glory of the Air 
(Herakles), because he represented the fine weather 
after the tempest. It was he who gave back serenity 
and splendor to the darkened sky, and who drove 
away the black clouds into the gloomy cave of malev- 
olent gods. 

But nascent Greece became, gradually, that select 
people, that charming and brilliant race of artists, 
which we all know to-day. Enamoured of the human 
ideal which it pursued in all things, it changed by de- 
grees its atmospheric gods into men. It clothed them 
with the purest and noblest human forms, and attrib- 
uted to them adventures often immoral, but always 
human. The Glory of the Air became the classic 
Hercules, the subduer of monsters ; the black clouds 
were sometimes ferocious beasts, of which he purged 
the earth ; sometimes nourishing cows, stolen by the 
hero from Cacus. 

Thus were divinized force in the human body, the 
vigor and suppleness of the muscles, the intrepidity, 
the victory of a strong and bold man over beings great- 
er and stronger than he, the triumph of man over the 
brute. The primal meaning of the name Herakles 
was forgotten. 

However, a time came w^hen the noble race of the 
Hellenes, having attained a high degree of cultivation 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 39 

through its poets, historians, and ^philosophers, was 
no longer content to adore physical energy. Then 
arose a new myth. This same Hercules was repre- 
sented no longer combating the Lernean hydra or the 
Nemean lion, but seated at the branching of two 
roads, that of good and that of evil, listening to the 
admonitions of wisdom and the seductions of pleasure, 
and heroically deciding for virtue in spite of all the 
allurements of vice. 

We see here the same type metamorphosed to suit 
the higher intellectual apprehensions of men. Hercu- 
les was at first only one of those blind forces of nature 
before which man is constrained to bow because they 
do not at all depend upon him, while his joy, his re- 
pose, and his life depend in a great measure upon 
them : this simple dependence was, among the Hel- 
lenes, the first nutriment of religious sentiment, and 
w^as for a long time sufficient to it. Afterwards man, 
his physical energy and generous impulses, his bra- 
very, the wonderful harmony of his faculties, appeared 
to the religious instinct the nearest approach to what 
is divine. Finally moral force, the victory of the hero 
over himself, more difficult and more meritorious than 
his rudest labors, remained alone worthy of the reli- 
gious homage of a people which already listened to 
and acknowledged the voice of conscience, although 
ignorant of its source. 



40 FIRST HISTORICAL TRxVNSFORMATIONS 

Here polytheism ended : it had attained the highest 
degree of which a rehgion of nature was capable. 
These three stages, exterior forces, the physical force of 
man, and the moral force, or virtue, having been passed 
through, there was nothing more to be said for Gre- 
cian polytheism. It had given to the world that por- 
tion of truth which it possessed ; and having accom- 
plished its work, it died. In vain was the moral myth 
of Hercules imitated in a thousand ways ; in vain 
were laborious efforts made to give a symbolical mean- 
ing to all Grecian mythology : it was found that this 
posthumous work, this child of science and of calcula- 
tion, was still-born, notwithstanding all the knov^ledge 
and intelligence of its creators. 

But until this sterile attempt, it is easy to see that 
polytheism had followed a progressive march in its 
developments, and that under its third form it ap- 
proached more nearly to truth and to Christianity than 
under the others. 

We are aware that it will seem impious to many 
persons to admit that Christianity did not fall from 
heaven like an aerolite, and that it profited from along 
historical or providential preparation. But this is a 
puerile prejudice. If the words of Jesus had fallen on 
unbroken ground, they would have remained inert and 
unfruitful, like the stones which come from bolides, 
or from lunar volcanoes. The field was tilled before 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 4I 

the sower appeared. Christianity, great and true as it 
is, would not have found any adherents if souls had 
not been capable of appreciating its worth. 

IV. 

Among the pagans another development, parallel to 
that of religion, and still more advanced, had arrived 
at results of the same nature. Philosophy had en- 
lightened minds, and even matured them. On this 
point men often limit themselves to a recognition of the 
supposed fact that the ancient systems of religion and 
philosophy had mutually abraded and refuted each oth- 
er, so that the human mind, when Jesus came, had rec- 
ognized its own incompetence, and w^as suffering from 
the void into which it was plunged, as well as from 
the profound lassitude which consumed it. But this 
view is incomplete and false, and does not render jus- 
tice to ancient thought, and to the conscience of the 
pagan world. Before Jesus Christ, Greek philosophy 
had made positive and imperishable conquests, which 
humanity has inherited, and of which it cannot be 
deprived. 

This philosophy was for a long time lost in vain 
cosmological speculations ; but after much discussion 
as to whether everything is derived from water, and 
whether the universe has the form of a cylinder or that 
of a cone, Hellenic thought finally turned back upon 



42 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

itself. Man wished to understand his own nature. In 
this respect Socrates gave to his contemporaries a 
powerful impulse — a fruitful tendency, which has 
never been abandoned. After him the so diverse sys- 
tems of Plato and Aristotle awakened still more strong- 
ly in man, through their very opposition, this sentiment, 
which leads him to distinguish himself from the uni- 
verse, and to re-enter into himself. It was a generally- 
admitted truth that the subject ought to suffice itself, 
Zeno and Epicurus went a step farther ; they sought 
to know the sovereign good, the meaning of human 
destiny, the aim of life. The moral life, the inner life, 
the idea of a work to be accomplished on the earth, be- 
gan to occupy the minds and to elevate the consciences 
of thoughtful men. In spite of the haughty sternness 
of their morality, the Stoics aspired after a noble ideal 
of virtue, and subordinated everything to reason. If 
the school of Epicurus gave itself up to voluptuous- 
ness, its leaders had begun with a better purpose ; they 
had contributed to the education of the conscience by 
isolating it from external circumstances, and by teach- 
ing man that he must seek his happiness in himself, 
independently of material surroundings. Scepticism 
itself was useful, inasmuch as it showed how partial 
and limited were all these abortive efforts of practical 
spiritualism ; it cleared the way, and made men desire 
a larger doctrine, a higher point of view. Finally, if 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 43 

eclecticism founded nothing, it saved from the ruins of 
former systems many precious truths, many admirable 
precepts. The worthy and steadfast Epictetus, Cicero, 
the most noted and most eloquent of all the philoso- 
phers of the century preceding Jesus, and at a later 
period Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher become mas- 
ter of the world, did not, indeed, cross the threshold of 
the Christian religion ; but it would be unjust to deny 
that more than once they ascended the first steps of the 
sanctuary. When Cicero, for example, declared that 
the best proof of the existence of God is the fact that 
men universally agree in believing it, was he very far 
from perceiving this supreme truth, that God is in each 
one of us? When he discovered in man innate ideas 
of duty and of morality, was he not approaching the 
grand Christian conception of conscience? Thus were 
formed in the souls of that period a natural morality, 
and even a natural theology, w^hich were not yet Chris- 
tianity, and could not take its place, but which ren- 
dered it desirable, and disposed a multitude of men to 
hail its advent. 

A kind of alliance w^as established, just before the 
commencement of our era, between this elevated phi- 
losophy and the popular religion, w^hich had been 
transformed to some extent in order to satisfy moral 
and religious w^ants purer than those of preceding 
centuries. The public worship of the gods of Olym- 



44 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

pus was left to the common herd ; whatever was liv- 
ing and respectable in ancient polytheism took refuge 
in the mysteries. These festivities, interdicted to all un- 
initiated persons, and conducted with strictest secrecy, 
were often made the occasion of the triumph of public 
vengeance and private hate, as has frequently happened 
in later days at the tribunal of the Holy Office and of the 
Inquisition. The majority of the mysteries were a kind 
of dramatic representation, in which philosophical and 
religious doctrines were portrayed in action by living 
personages, or shadowed forth by symbolical rites and 
processions. The initiated prepared themselves a long 
time in advance by several degrees of purification, both 
physical and moral. It appears that the essential part 
of the Eleusinian mysteries was a drama of several 
days' duration, wherein the fable of Ceres and Proser- 
pina (Demeter and Persephone) served as a veil to the 
doctrine of immortality and of the resurrection. Pro- 
serpina, carried away by the god of the infernal 
regions, and sought in vain by her mother through the 
world, had been reclaimed at once by Pluto, her hus- 
band, and by Ceres, before the tribunal of Jupiter. 
The father of gods and men decided that she should 
pass six months of the year under the earth, and six 
months in the light of day. This fable was regarded 
as a twofold symbol. It typified the wheat of the 
seed-time, which for a season remains buried in the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 45 

soil, and seems dead, but finally springs from the earth 
full of life and fruitfulness ; it typified also the human 
soul, which disappears from this world by death only 
to be born to a higher life. These doctrines, sung in 
the symbolical hymns, gave full scope to some of the 
sublimest hopes and noblest aspirations of humanity. 
One loves to hear Plutarch consoling his wife, after the 
death of their daughter, by reminding her of the beau- 
tiful beliefs which she had learned in the mysteries of 
Bacchus, according to which the soul of the deceased 
preserves the power of feeling, and even experi- 
ences a kind of emancipation in escaping from the 
bondage of matter. He adds that if this soul be pure 
and elevated, it readily accustoms itself to a more 
perfect condition, whilst, in the contrary case, it re- 
enters, by successive births, into several human bodies. 
These touching thoughts, which approximate some 
of the sublimest teachings of Christianity, were the last 
and purest ray of light cast upon the world by expir- 
ing paganism. But such ideas were only the privi- 
lege of the initiated, and of a moral elite by no means 
numerous ; the masses of the people did not lift them- 
selves to this height. The forms of religion generally 
known and practised had been outgrown and con- 
demned by the public mind. Incredulity was more 
and more rife. Gibbon has rightly said that all forms 
of worship were considered by the people as equally 



46 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

true, by the learned as equally false, and by the magis- 
trates as equally useful. The profoundly sceptical 
leaders of Roman society rendered to the official cultus 
those hypocritical and interested forms of respect by 
which the people are never duped, and which degrade 
in their eyes those who govern, w^ithout elevating in 
their minds the gods in whom they no longer believe. 
The contemptuous question of Pontius Pilate to Jesus, 
" What is truth? ^"^ has been justly compared with the 
desperate cry of Brutus on the battle-ground of Phi- 
lippi : '-''O Virtue^ I have followed thee through life^ 
and find thee at last but a shadow J^ * But these two 
famous utterances have served as themes for many ill- 
founded declamations. 

In many souls incredulity was at once the effect 
and the symptom of the pressing need of a loftier 
faith. Porphyry himself depicts his contemporaries 
as experiencing deep religious wants. All pagan 
forms of worship had become gradually mingled and 
merged into the ancient cultus of Rome, itself trans- 
formed by contact with Grecian polytheism, into 
which it had been partially absorbed. The most 
diverse rites and the most incoherent fables, the most 
primitive gods and the most complicated systems, had 
all been tried at Rome. Each had had its day of 

* Quoted by him from the Hercules Mad of Euripides. See 
Dio Cassius, i. 47. 



OF CPIRISTIANITY. 47 

novelty and favor, but all had been lost in the same 
abyss of disappointment, weariness, and disgust. 
Hence a despair which was not always void of dig- 
nity and grandeur, but which sometimes wandered 
away into the most absurd and degrading supersti- 
tions. Man began to recognize in himself a moral 
and responsible being, born to believe the true and 
to practise the good. But faith was wanting. Never 
was an epoch more desolated by foreign and intestine 
wars, political assassinations, and wholesale proscrip- 
tions, than that of Marius, Sylla, C^sar, and Octavius 
— monsters glutted with blood, who sacrificed human 
hecatombs to their execrable ambition. Never had 
morals been so generally corrupt and depraved. The 
crimes of modern times pale before the shameless extor- 
tions, the nameless debaucheries, and the cruel frenzies 
of illustrious Romans of every party. Brutus was no 
better than Csesar.* In the midst of so many horrors, 
troubled consciences sought in vain for an appease- 
ment of their misery in the strangest symbols and 

* Cicero {Letters to Atticus, V. 21. VI. i. and 2.) has re- 
counted the terrible exactions of Brutus, especially at Salamis, 
in the Isle of Cyprus. In consequence of an enormously 
usurious and oppressive tax (forty-eight per cent.) which 
Brutus levied on that city, five senators of Salamis died of 
starvation in the palace, where the agent of Brutus claimed 
the right to keep them incarcerated until they should pay a 
sum which they did not possess (two hundred thousand dol- 
lars). 



48 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

ceremonies. In vain sacred crimes were multiplied, 
varied, and refined ; in vain chosen victims, and even 
human victims, were immolated ; in vain, for the honor 
of the gods and the satisfaction of conscience, was 
nature outraged and God blasphemed by the most 
execrable homage. Nothing healed remorse, nothing 
calmed despair. Even when the worshipper, lying 
.naked under the riddle of the filthy taurobolium, was 
wholly saturated with the blood of a bull slaughtered 
above him, this sumptuous horror failed to cure the 
secret wound of his soul. Men hoped to appease 
God, and did not even pacify their own consciences. 

This same Plutarch, whose beautiful words on im- 
mortality we have cited, wrote a singular and highly 
instructive treatise, entitled, not as it is usually trans- 
lated. Concerning Superstition^ but Concerning Re- 
ligious Terror,^ It is thus that he designates a 
morbid state of soul, a sort of moral malady very 
common in his time. In this gloomy book we see 
how many melancholy victims of this disease were 
cruelly tormented by incessant fears. Convinced that 
they had provoked celestial wrath, these unfortunates 
did not doubt that the gods had the power and the 
implacable desire to torture them during life, and still 
more after death. They were continually and every- 
where meeting a thousand fatal omens, a thousand 
fearful indications of the ever-impending and ever- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 49 

insatiable vengeance of their invisible but all-powerful 
enemies. Plutarch exclaims, in respect to these peo- 
ple, " Everything in their experience belies the saying 
of Pythagoras, that in approaching the gods we become 
better ; it is then that they are most miserable and 
most perverted." The unhappy beings in whom the 
moral and religious sense had been thus distorted, 
believed that blood was necessary to w^ash away their 
real or imaginary crimes ; they offered horrible sacri- 
fices, like that of the black hen (still imitated in our 
days by the Algerine women, and even by some of the 
French peasants). The poor animal was tortured as 
cruelly as possible, in order to divert upon it, and satisfy 
at its expense, the divine malevolence. The worship- 
per then threw the ashes of the victim, and everything 
that had been used in this hideous sacrifice, over his 
head into the sea, or into running v^ater,* and if these 
were wanting, into certain spaces reserved at the 
corners of cross-roads. If a man, or any living crea- 
ture w^hatever, stepped upon these objects stained with 
the sins of others, he became burdened, by a mysteri- 
ous substitution, with the crimes thus expiated, and 
exposed to the wrath of heaven and of hell.f But 

* Fer cineres, Amarvlli floras rivoque fluenti 

Transque caput jace: ne respexeris.—- Virgil, Eel. VIII. 

t To walk upon the remains of an expiatory sacrifice was 
purgamentum in trivio calcare. 

4 



50 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

this lugubrious ceremony, which perhaps had tranquil- 
lized disturbed souls in other times, had lost its effi- 
cacy, and nothing was now found to reassure the 
uneasy conscience. 

No one can ignore the fact that political circum- 
stances favored the dissemination of Christianity. 
Roman unity was everywhere established ; means of 
communication had acquired an unheard-of degree of 
safety and speed. On the sea, piracy had been de- 
stroyed ; and on the land, all countries were bound 
together and traversed by highways so admirable that 
considerable vestiges of them still remain, after an 
abandonment of ten or fifteen centuries. The domin- 
ion of Rome was more widely extended than ever 
before, but its decadence was already harbingered by 
the fall of the two most noble attributes of Greco- 
Roman civilization — liberty irrevocably lost, and art, 
whose decline could not long delay.* Peace reigned 
among all nations. Now, that could be only an era 
of general pacification which would permit nations 
long hostile to listen to a doctrine of universal brother- 
hood and universal forgiveness. Furthermore, the 
Romans, by substituting their sole legislation for the 
diverse customs and characteristic manners of the 
conquered nationalities, had forced men to recognize 
gradually their common bonds and interests. The 

* Hase, Leben Jesu^ 42. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 5 1 

Greek was less purely Greek, the Scythian less bar- 
barous, and the Jew, especially out of Palestine, less 
exclusive in his pride as son of Abraham. 

V. 

The state of mind among the Israelites * was not 
less worthy of note. For a long time this peculiar 
people, hostile to all other nations, by whom they 
were hated and despised in turn, had entertained with 
great tenacity two contradictory ideas, without per- 
ceiving in what respect they were irreconcilable : on 
the one hand, a firm belief in one God, a Holy God, 
sole Creator and Ruler of the world, who had caused 
the whole human race to be born of a single pair, 
and on whom alone depended absolutely the destiny of 
all men and of all nations ; on the other hand, the full 
conviction that this God of all was the special God of 
the one people of Israel, bound by an alliance con- 
cluded with the head of the Hebrew race, so that He 
must forever choose this one nation, and protect it 
against all others. 

We can here only indicate the successive transfor- 
mations of the religion of the children of Abraham. 
It is very far from the truth to imagine, on the faith of 
Israelitish or Christian orthodoxies, that this religion 

* Michel Nicolas, Etudes Critiques sur la Bible, A, T. Also 
Doctrines religieuses des Juifs, by the same author. 



52 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

has changed only rites and forms, from the sacrifices 
offered by the patriarch under the oaks of Mamre, to 
the feasts of the temple of Herod, where Jesus taught. 
It is wrong to take as synonymes the successive names 
of Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews. 

The Hebrew had a primitive religion of great 
simplicity, and worshipped God under the name of 
Elohim, a plural word signifying powers. 

With Abraham and his grandson Jacob, surnamed 
Israel, this religion assumed the very lofty and efficient 
character of an alliance between Jehovah (the I AM) 
and the sons of Abraham, who constituted themselves 
into a nation under the name of Israelites. From 
that time a double current was established ; the wor- 
ships of Elohim, which did not exclude the symboli- 
cal images of animals or of men, representing divine 
energies, was yet for a long time celebrated, especially 
on the High Places; but the more spiritual worship 
of Jehovah which proscribed every image of the in- 
visible and infinite Being, struggled with increasing 
success against the Eloistic proclivities of the people, 
which often degenerated into idolatry. 

Moses organized the Jehovistic religion simultane- 
ously with the civil and national life, under the sole 
title of the Law. The idea of the absolute Being 
replaced the vague and impersonal attribute of power. 
Mosaism was a religion of detail, and of ceremonies, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 53 

regulating everything in life and in piety. David the 
crowned poet, and Solomon the prince of peace and 
of magnificence, established the cultus on a splendid 
and official basis. 

Nevertheless, after Samuel, there were formed in the 
schools of the prophets men of God^ who kept alive 
in the nation a remembrance of its alliance with 
Tehovah, and the duties arising therefroin for every 
Israelite. Sometimes in bodies, sometimes isolated, 
the prophets constantly renewed the notion of the 
theocratic mission of Israel, resisted with intrepidity 
the multitude, the kings, especially the priests, and 
preached, in the name of God, an extremely pure 
morality and piety, in a language wonderful for its 
oratorical movement and lofty poesy. 

The transportation of Israel into Assyria opened a 
new era. The national pride having been humil- 
iated, and the ceremonial worship rendered impos- 
sible, synagogues were established ; that is to say, 
the people assembled to pray together, to meditate on 
the Holy Scriptures, and to sing psalms. A spiritual 
and interior worship thus began to replace the sacri- 
fices.* 

The Jews (that is to say, the liberated captives who 

* This austere worship, devoid of symbols, in which Jesus 
and the apostles took an active part, is still that of the 
reformed churches. 



54 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

returned to their own country, and reorganized the 
kingdom of Judah) came back penetrated with Oriental 
notions. Their ancestors had been materiahsts ; they, 
on the contrary, recognized in all things the interven- 
tion of spirits (angels or demons). Idolatry and the 
worship of Elohim had both ceased. 

More and more powerful became the expectation 
of a national restoration, which should not only renew 
the ancient theocracy of David and Solomon, but also 
extend it to the whole world, under the reign of an 
heir of the Jewish kings, named in advance Anointed 
of yehovah^ or Messiah, Israel alone among the 
ancient nations had early entertained the idea, the 
intuition, of a philosophy of histor3^ It believed itself 
providentially predestined to conquer, convert, and 
govern the human race, and associated with the 
realization of its national hopes the accomplishment 
of all things, and the end of the world. 

In the age of Augustus, this exclusive people, which 
had wished to live isolated from the rest of the world, 
believed more firmly than ever in Jehovah, but was 
involved, in spite of itself, in the general movement, 
and drawn along with the rest of the human race, by 
the irresistible march of events. 

Situated in Asia, but very near Africa and Europe, 
at the extremity of the Mediterranean, which has been 
styled the great highway of ancient history, this little 



.t 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 55 

people had been three times subjugated by foreign 
races. First, by the Assyrians, who had carried cap- 
tive a great number of Jews into the vast plains of the 
East ; then by Alexander the Great and the Seleucides, 
who by right of conquest initiated Israel into Grecian 
civilization ; finally, after Pompey, by the Romans, 
whose hard and insolent yoke irritated to the highest 
degree the immense pride of the conquered people. 

Thus mingled with the great current of history, 
Judaism divided itself into two branches — that of 
Palestine, and that w^iich was called the Dispersion, 
In their own country, pressing around the one temple 
and the one altar, the pure Israelites set themselves 
inflexibly and passionately against everything coming 
from without. Their rabbins, in innumerable writings, 
cursed the Israelite who should be so recreant as to 
learn Greek or teach it to his son. Sects were 
formed ; and however diverse these might be. they 
had for a common principle the love of orthodoxy, 
and the pretension of preserving the manners and 
ideas of their fathers. 

But the desperate obstinacy with which Israel clung 
to its old laws in the midst of a world that was under- 
going transformation, is only one symptom of the 
mortal evil from which Judaism was suffering. It 
was conscious, in spite of itself, of the manifest 
contradiction between the universality of its religion 



56 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

as regards its God, and the exclusiveness of this same 
religion as regards the monopoly of a chosen people. 

The Sadducees, a sort of Epicurean and material- 
istic sect, denied the immortality, and even the exist- 
ence, of the soul, as beliefs foreign to ancient Mosaism. 
The Pharisees, or Separatists^ exaggerated, with 
acrid fanaticism, all that was characteristic and ex- 
clusive in the nationality and religion of Israel. 
They carried to extremes the worship of the letter, 
necessarily confused among a people whose religion 
was a law ; and sanctioned with the same authority — 
the injunctions of Jehovah — public sanitary measures, 
or simple police regulations, and the purest and sub- 
limest religious instructions that the ancient world 
has known. To a true Jew, the prohibition to employ 
the fat of the victims for the cakes of oblation (a 
prohibition intended to propagate the cultivation of 
olives) was as sacred as the admirable precepts of 
love for God and for men afterwards reunited by Jesus 
in the summary of the law ; or that sublime utterance 
of Leviticus, " Te shall be holy^ for I the Lord your 
God am holyJ^ The Pharisees exaggerated the for- 
malistic and legal character of their religion to the 
point of maintaining that if a man break a limb on 
Friday evening after sundown, he must wait twenty- 
four hours to have it set, from fear of violating the law 

* Lev. xix. 2. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 57 

of the Sabbath. This strange sect presented, at the 
period of which we are speaking, striking contrasts : 
while some of its adepts were deserving of admira- 
tion by reason of their stainless lives, and a love of 
country exalted to heroism, many others, slipping 
on the fatal declivity of formalism, fell into immo- 
rality and hypocrisy, without, however, ceasing to be 
fanatical. 

It was otherwise wath the very numerous Israelites 
whom war, commerce, and the Assyrian captivity had 
scattered throughout the whole w^orld. These spoke 
Greek, that language having become, what Latin was 
at a much later period, the universal medium of com- 
munication among all nations. In all the great cities, 
especially in Alexandria and Antioch, the two flour- 
ishing capitals of Egypt and Syria, this dispersed 
people formed numerous societies, at the head of 
which were placed rich and influential families. 
Their brothers of Palestine called them Hellenists^ 
and deemed themselves, not without reason, much 
purer Israelites than they. We shall see the Hellen- 
ists play a great and fine role of transition between 
their race and the rest of the world, in the interest of 
Christianity. 

The Hellenistic Jews had been initiated, by sur- 
rounding circumstances, into the civilization, litera- 
ture, and philosophy of the Greeks, through which 



58 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

their minds had been opened and enhirged. Yet they 
had not ceased to regard the Jewish Bible as divine 
and infalhble. They had even translated it into Greek 
under the Ptolemies, for the sake of those among them 
to whom the language of their native country had 
become foreign. But they reserved the right of ex- 
plaining allegorically all that they found difficult to 
believe. Thus freed from the oppressive yoke of the 
letter, they raised themselves above the old national 
exclusiveness, and furnished to Christianity a great 
number of well-prepared disciples. 

We ought also to mention two other sects, which 
originated, under analogous names, among both the 
Palestinian and Hellenistic Jews, for the purpose of 
resisting the general dissoluteness of morals, and 
appeasing the painful uneasiness of consciences. 
The name of Essenes in Judea, and that of Thera- 
feutce in Egypt, signify equally healers — that is, of 
souls. To keep their souls open to influences from 
above, these sectaries, whom recent researches con- 
nect with the traditions of Pythagoms, imposed upon 
themselves an ascetic and monastic life, very different, 
doubtless, from the Christian life, but wherein they 
practised self-abnegation and spiritual exercises ; and 
Jesus, in Galilee, certainly had several of their adhe- 
rents among his auditors, of whom they were the 
most serious and the most eager for truth and moral 
elevation. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 59 

Thus the ground was ah'eacly prepared when Jesus 
sowed in it the good seed. St. Paul (Gal. iii. 24) has 
rightly compared the Jewish law to that slave called 
^edagogiie^ whose office, in the wealthy families of 
the ancients, was to conduct the children to school. 
We may also say with truth, that the diverse religions, 
with their progressive transformations, Greek philos- 
ophy, Roman politics, led humanity by different ways, 
but with one accord, to the school of the gospel, and 
impelled it into the arms of Jesus Christ. 

In fine, the predecessors of Jesus had been able to 
bring each his stone to the future temple of the Spirit. 
But the Spirit itself, who but Jesus has given it to us ? 
And this Spirit, what is it? This question, of supreme 
importance, we shall now attempt to answer. 



6o FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER III. 

THE CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

" If Jesus were to appear to-daj among Christians, they 
would nail him to the cross, as did the Jews." — Zschokke, 

I. 

LET us endeavor to free the personal teaching of 
Jesus from the more or less legitimate develop- 
ments which it afterwards received. Let us seize primi- 
tive Christianity at its source, in its essence, as it issued 
from the heart and thought of its author. Let us neg- 
lect, if need be, in his own instructions, occasional 
obscure utterances, isolated or insufficiently attested, 
and let us know what he taught from day to day — 
what those believed to whom he solemnly declared, 
^^ Thy faith hath saved thee^^ or " Thy siizs are for- 
given thee,^^ 

We do not forget that each Christian can sum up in 
his own manner the teachings of Christ, and that all 
of these abridgments are different — a fact v/hich is 
explained alike by the richness of the field and the 
individuality of those who cultivate it. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 6l 

Thus, while we do not pretend to impose our senti- 
ments upon any one, we shall exert ourselves to repro- 
duce the doctrine of the apostles, free from any pre- 
possession or prejudice, in accordance with the testi- 
mony of the Gospels, and especially of the first three.* 

The abstract word religion^ and the names which 
recall his person, such as Christianity^ or Christia7i 
religion^ are strangers to the language of Jesus. 
What we mean by these terms, he designated, with far 
greater depth and scope, by a word which the church 
has erred in almost always neglecting, and often for- 
getting — the reig7z^ or ki7zgdo7JZ of God^ or of heave7z. 
This is what he w^ished to found, and the coming of 
which he unceasingly preached. His whole ambition 
was to establish the reign of heaven upon earth, and 
cause God to rule in the consciences of men. The 
constant object of his instructions, his conversations, 
his prayers, was the reign of God in us, manifesting 
itself in the depths of the soul, without ostentation or 
external pomp ; the holiness of God comprehended 
and respected ; His will accepted, obeyed with abne- 
gation, with zeal, on earth as in heaven. This was 
the sole aim of Jesus in his ministry. 

* It will be seen in Chapter IX., onjohannean Christianitj^, 
why we, in common with nearly all contemporary theologians, 
are obliged to place the historical authority of Matthew, Mark, 
and Luke in the first rank, and that of John in the second. 



62 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

To this single end corresponds a single motive pow- 
er. The idea of the divine kingdom was not new ; it 
had presented itself to many minds, and the Jewish 
people especially had been pleased to consider itself 
the peculiar kingdom of Jehovah. But this kingdom 
was restricted, and this God reigned by terror. 

Jesus wished that God should be the King, obeyed 
by all those of whom He is the Father ; that is, by all 
men ; and he did not make His reign consist in the 
passive or physical obedience which a despot exacts, 
but in the love which a father has a right to require of 
his children. Before the idea of the paternity of God 
all particularism, all religious monopoly, disappear. 
Before the love of the Father for His children, all exter- 
nal, legal, formal obedience becomes radically insuffi- 
cient. It is in the interior of souls that God washes to 
reign, that is, to be loved. 

The reign of God is only the infinite love of the 
Father for His children ; to which ought to correspond 
the measureless filial love of all the children for their 
Father, and the fraternal love which each child of God 
owes to all the others. No one has the right to love 
his brethren less than he loves himself, since they are 
what he is before God, and since he ought to refer 
everything to God. 

But how does Jesus intend to establish the reign of 
God solely upon the motive of love ? How is the love 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 63 

of God to restore to Him, and subject to His will, men 
who love only themselves instead of loving their God 
and their neighbor? 

The infinite charity of God for His erring children 
manifests itself, according to Jesus, bj^ a twofold action 
— pardon, and renewal of life. These are two acts 
inseparable from the same love. 

Pardon is offered by God to ^^vhoever repents ; it is 
offered directly, gratuitously. Henceforth it has noth- 
ing to do with any insulted and vindictive divinity, 
who can be appeased and bribed by offerings, or whose 
wrath must be diverted upon some expiatory victim. 
The good shepherd seeks the lost sheep until he finds 
it, and brings it back on his own shoulders. The 
father of the prodigal son runs to meet him in order to 
load him with kindnesses, with marks of affection and 
honor. 

Divine holiness has in view, in its relations with the 
sinner, not revenge, which would be unworthy of God 
and contrary to His nature, but sanctification, which is 
conformable at once to the nature of the Father and 
of the guilty child. Moreover, as God does not avenge 
Himself, and as we all have need of pardon, we are 
bound to act towards our brethren as God acts towards 
us. Vengeance, which was made by pagan and Jew- 
ish antiquity a merit and a right, is now a crime ; and 
mutual forgiveness, like mutual love, is a duty. 



64 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

This whole doctrine of pardon rests on a fact which 
Jesus never deemed it necessary to affirm in an ab- 
stract form, but which he constantly assumes as recog- 
nized : the fact of the existence of sin — moral evil. He 
never troubles himself about abstractions. He always 
takes for his point of departure the actual state of the 
consciences which he is addressing. He has a gen- 
uine compassion for the moral miseries of free beings 
who are living in sin, and whom he wishes to lift out 
of their degradation. It is the sick whom he offers to 
heal — the poor slaves of passion and of egoism whom 
he wishes to emancipate. He has such an absolute 
certainty of the power of God, and of the efficacy of 
the good and -the true, such a full confidence in the 
perfectibility of guilty man, such a high esteem for hu- 
man nature, wholly sinful as it is, that in his eyes the 
elevation, the healing, the salvation, the enfranchise- 
ment of every soul that is willing to return to God and 
love Him are not an object of the slightest doubt. 

Pardon consoles, rehabilitates, vivifies. It inaugu- 
rates a new life, which is the moral life, the life of the 
spirit. God imparts to man His holy and good Spirit. 
A community of desire, of thought, of love, is estab- 
lished between the Father and His restored children. 
God reigns ; not only obeyed, but loved and imitated 
by those whom He has created in His image, and who 
are working to restore in themselves this likeness, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 65 

which has been changed and effaced by sin. God is 
thus the goal towards which all His creatures gravi- 
tate — whose destiny is to become like Him. Man will 
labor unceasingly during this life, and through eter- 
nity, to become more like his Creator — compassionate 
and holy ; perfect, as his heavenly Father is perfect. 

It is plain that the notion of Christian perfection im- 
plies and involves the idea of immortality. The com- 
munion which Jesus wishes to establish between the 
Christian soul and the living God is so real, so inti- 
mate, that the soul has nothing to fear from death. 
Jesus, as was said at a later period, " delivered them 
who through fear of death were all their lifetime 
subject to bondage r * Not that Christ ever took care 
to demonstrate immortality ; it can not be doubtful 
to a soul in which God reigns : to die is to render 
back the spirit into the hands of the Father : to die is 
also, in one sense, to go to God. 

In short, the whole instruction of Jesus can be in- 
cluded in the following formula : the work to be 
accomplished is the reign of God in all consciences : 
the universal motive through which this reign is to be 
established, the essential fact of this reign, is love, of 
w^hich the twofold manifestation is pardon and new 
or eternal life : and these two manifestations presup- 

* Heb. ii. 15. 



66 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

pose two facts, whose certainty has no need of proof 
— sin and immortality. Thus reducing all Christian- 
ity to. a single formula, it inay be said that Jesus re- 
vealed to all sinners the eternal compassion of the God 
of holiness, their Father. 

11. 

That which distinguishes Jesus among moralists and 
founders of religion is the perfect harmony between 
his doctrine and his character : what he enjoined upon 
others to do, he did ; what he advised them to become, 
he was. To do the will of his Father was his daily 
meat aiid drink. His ardent love of men, his tender 
and unwearying pity for all that were stained and de- 
based, his sublime abnegation, showed him faithful to 
himself and to his Father in life and in death. He was 
an essentially practical master ; his character is the no- 
blest and most touching demonstration of his doctrine, 
and his acts are the best commentary on his words. 

A Jew by education and by all the circumstances of 
his life, he lifted himself in heart and mind so high 
above national narrowness, he found such a power 
of generalization in his love of God and men, that 
he was, in reality, not Jewish, but human. While 
the best and greatest among those who preceded 
him bear the lively impress of their race, Jesus be- 
longed exclusively to no race. We cannot cite one 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 67 

of the prophets who v^as not essentially Israelitlsh : 
the greatest of the philosophers, and even Socrates 
himself, are profoundly Greek ; Sakyamuni is Hin- 
doo par excellence, Jesus alone surpasses them all, 
and rules equally over all diversities of race and of 
nationality ; his w^ord and his life have entered into the 
common fund from which all souls are fed. Human- 
ity rightfully claims these as its own, and notwith- 
standing its innumerable variations, finds itself entire 
in them. 

Although Jesus had the right to say, I am never 
alone because the Father is with 7ne^ and although 
the church in its gratitude gave him early the brilliant 
titles of supreme sacrificer, and high priest of the 
human race, yet was never any one farther removed 
than he from every trace of the sacerdotal spirit. Es- 
sentially laic in purpose and in thought, as in reality, 
he was, and wished to be, the holy one and the jiist^ 
not in an ascetic cloister, nor in the desert, but in the 
midst of the world. He took part systematically in 
the social life of his time, conducting his disciples into 
the reunions of his countrymen, participating in their 
weddings and other festivities, and living their life, 
sometimes on a fisherman's bark by the Lake of Gen- 
nesaret, sometimes in one of the halls of the Temple, 
among the doctors. He was too great to know dis- 
dain. He was too noble and too just to repel the most 



68 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

guilty if they were repentant. Hence the strict Phar- 
isees contemptuously called him a gluttonous man 
and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. 
While false sanctity fled from contact with fallen souls 
through fear of being stained thereby, Jesus showed 
that true sanctity seeks these in order to elevate them. 
The w^orld owed to him the touching spectacle of 
moral purity attracting to itself degraded beings in 
order to communicate itself to them and to transform 
them. With more right than any other one, Jesus 
could have said, Nothmg human is indifferent to 
me; * he wdio blessed the innocence of little children 
by declaring that the kingdom of heaven belongs to 
them, and those who resemble them ; he who broke 
away from the inveterate prejudice of the Orient by 
recognizing in the soul of woman the same right to 
truth and to eternal life that belongs to the soul of 
man ; he who with incomparable authority and infinite 
delicacy of language restored the penitent adulteress, 
the publicans, abhorred as traitors to their country, 
and the Samaritans, cursed as heretics. 

It has been a mistake of our days to deny the ener- 
getic virility of Christ's character ; monastic orders, 
and especially nuns, have entertained a false idea of 
him, have created for themselves an insipid, enervat- 
ed type, which they call their Sweet Jesus. Doubt- 

* Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum puto, — Terence. 



M 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 69 

less he was mild and humble of heart ; he declared 
himself to be so, and won many souls laboring and 
heavy-laden, the weak and helpless ones of earth, to 
confide in his gentleness. Doubdess, too, he endured 
all anguish, ignominy, and fearful torture with heroic 
serenity, even pardoning his executioners. But far 
from being guilty of effeminacy or of undue compla- 
cency, he drew upon himself mortal hatreds, and 
braved them, when he boldly assailed the pride of the 
people, the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the formalism 
of the priests, the worship of the letter among the 
Scribes, the sensual egotism of the rich, and the des- 
potism of the great. He displayed, when he wished, 
a terrible majesty. He knew how to exercise an irre- 
sistible ascendency in order to sweep from the Temple 
of his Father and his God the profaners who made a 
trade and a merchandise of religion. He unmasked, 
with keen severity, the false sanctity by which the 
people were duped ; and never did any one brand like 
him the brow of hypocrisy with infamous and inefface- 
able stigmas. We unhesitatingly urge any one, who 
may hold the least doubt as to the masculine authority 
of the character and the language of Jesus, to re-read 
his discourses. What power of command, what 
grandeur, in words like these ! '•''Let the dead bury 
their dead. No ma7i having put his hand to the 
plough,, and looking back^ is Jit for the kingdom of 



*]0 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

God, Whosoever will co77ze after me^ let him deiiy 
himself^ and take up his cross ^ and follow me,^' 
Think 72ot that I ain come to se7td peace 07z earth; 
I ca77te 7iot to se7id peace^ but a sword, I a7n coTne 
to se7id Jire 07t the earth; and what will I if it he 
already ki7idled? "f It is sufficient to read the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, and the imprecation against 
Phariseeism,! to become convinced that Christ was 
not only the gentlest of men, but also the most for- 
midable avenger of the oppressed, and scourge of 
hypocrisy. These passages explain perfectly why 
those whom he stripped of their deceitful prestige, 
and denounced with so much authority, revenged 
themselves by crucifying him. 

A desire for unity was, as we have seen, a charac- 
teristic of the age ; and Jesus himself, who regarded 
humanity as one family, the family of God, aspired 
more earnestly and wisely towards true unity than any 
others of his time. The danger of the situation lay 
in the very facility with which a fictitious, sectarian, 
external unity might have been established. Jesus did 
nothing to encourage this tendency. To this general 
conscious need, he refused every other satisfaction 
than the great unity of the Spirit of God, or of uni- 

*Matt. viii. 22. Luke ix. 62.- Mark viii. 34. 

t Matt. X. 34. Luke xii. 49. 

X Matt., chapters v., vi., vii., and xxiii. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 7I 

versal love. Wishing to establish only the inner reign 
of God, he left no writings, no creed, no code, no rule 
of life, no church organization, no plan of state con- 
stitution, no clerical investiture. The different clergy- 
men who claim to have inherited powers from the 
apostles have forgotten three very simple facts : first, 
that the apostleship was not a priesthood ; second, that 
this title, borne at first by the twelve, then by Matthias, 
Paul, and Barnabas, did not possess, even in the 
primitive church, the exclusive character attributed to 
it ; third, that the unbroken transmission of pretended 
apostolic rights belongs to those things which must 
be, not presumed, but proved. To establish a right, 
it is not enough to claim that it exists ; it must be 
demonstrated. 

Christ cared so little for external unity, that, on learn- 
ing, one day, from his scandalized disciples that a 
stranger was acting in his name, and preaching his 
religion, without, however, wishing to join his society, 
he defended this premature schismatic against theii 
intolerance, and said to them, with calm authority, 
^''Forbid him not; for he that is not against us is 

for us»^ * 

Two popular rites of extreme simplicity are all that 

"Christ instituted. The first — sign of initiation, sym- 
bol of entrance into the kingdom of God — is an 

* Mark ix. 40. Luke ix. 50. 



72 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

ablution. Nothing more natural, since water, which 
washes stains from the body, was, in the East, the 
generally accepted emblem of moral purification. The 
new disciple plunged his whole body into pure water, 
to indicate that he wished to purify his whole soul 
under the influence of the new religion. It may be 
asked whether Jesus intended to dictate an unchange- 
able formula of baptism when he said to his apostles, 
" Teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of 
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." 
The church thinks so, but the apostles did not believe 
it, and baptized simply in the name of Jesus ; if not 
always, at least sometimes.* Nevertheless, the formula 
is of great beauty, and provided it be not looked at 
under the false light of Trinitarian complications, its 
primitive meaning is as natural as elevated ; a new 
Christian, consecrated first of all to God, then to 
Jesus, whose disciple he declares himself to be, and 
finally to the Spirit, the Spirit of God and of Christ, 
who is in us the result and the practical aim of Chris- 
tianity. The Father is religion in the absolute ; the 
Son is religion in humanity, in history ; the Holy 
Spirit is religion in the conscience of each one of us. 
This last term is as indispensable here as the conclu- 
sion would be in a syllogism. But this is very far 

* Rom. vi. 3. Gal. iii. 27. 1 Cor. i. 13. Acts ii. 38; viii. 16; 
X. 40 ; xix. 5. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 73 

from the idea of three persons in God, distinct, abso- 
lutely equal, and being, in these three, only one God. 

The second Christian rite is a common repast, a 
memorial of the last repast which Jesus took with 
his disciples before his death. In his farewell to the 
twelve he requested them to renew this simple ban- 
quet in memory of him : of the bread which he broke 
according to the custom, in order to distribute it to 
them, and of the wine which he poured out for them, 
he made the symbols of his body which death would 
soon break, and of the blood which he was about to 
shed. 

Thenceforth brothers in Christ, partaking of the 
same bread, and passing from hand to hand the same 
cup, commune ; that is to say, are united to their 
heavenly Father and to each other by this twofold 
love, which is the very essence of Christianity, and in 
which consists the reign of God. Of all the religious 
rites which have come to our knowledge, none is so 
touching and so sublime as this ; none expresses so 
well the loftiest sentiments which the human heart 
can experience. 

The more simply, and in conformity to the primitive 
institution, the Holy Supper is celebrated, the more 
vividly the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of 
men, their equality before the Father, their mutual 
duties, the memory of Jesus Christ and his sublime 



74 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

death, are represented to the imagniation and to the 
thought, to the conscience and to the heart. While 
baptism, as a form of initiation, is used only once in 
the career of each Christian, the communion is re- 
newed, bringing man again into the presence of his 
Creator, his Savior, and his brethren, and nourishing 
in him feelings of piety and charity, which would soon 
grow feeble if he did not come to strengthen them 
anew at their divine source. 

III. 

The memory of Jesus, his character, his personality, 
have taken a place at the head of humanity. The 
human race sees itself reflected in this splendid image, 
and recognizes its ideal realized. Those, even, who 
do not believe in him, know him well enough to re- 
proach, often wath justice, his ministers and his disci- 
ples for resembling him too little. His sublimely 
humble form, wherein beams the divine spirit, lives in 
the consciousness of the Christian, and, though fre- 
quently perverted, is yet recognizable, loved, and 
revered. He remains the centre and sole foundation 
of his church ; towards him, from all points of the 
religious horizon, are turned the looks of the members 
of all particular churches. In him, and by him. 
Catholics, Greco-Russians, Protestants of every sect, 
are at bottom and in reality, although in different 



I 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 75 

degrees, disciples of the same religion. It has been 
rightly said, that between the most ecstatic monk of 
the middle ages and the least orthodox liberal believer 
of our days, there is Jesus Christ in common, over- 
ruling all differences. Through the innumerable vi- 
cissitudes of the history of Christianity, among the 
incessant variations of all Christian systems, under the 
perpetual transformations of religion, that which re- 
mains invariable, and constitutes the existing unity, is 
Christ himself. 

Liberal Protestants* are constantly asked where they 
would fix the boundary which separates Christians 
from those who are not Christians. Each man has 
the right to solve this formidable problem in the light 
of his own conscience. As for ourselves, here is our 
reply : it is the same as that which the apostles 
offered to their proselytes as a sole and sufficient con- 
fession of faith : ^''Believe on the Lord yesus Christy 
and thou shalt be saved J^ * 

In our opinio-n, he is a Christian, or deserves to be 
regarded as such, who calls upon the name of Jesus, 
Vvho declares that he believes in Jesus. This sacred 
name, this august and unequalled personality, re- 
sumes and represents sufficiently in itself alone all his 
doctrine ; that is to say, the reign of God in us, the 
love of God and of men, the pardon of sins, and the 

* Acts viii. 37; xvi. 31. ^ 



*]6 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

spiritual life. It may be that occasionally one or the 
other of these essential elements of the Christian 
religion may be too much neglected ; but so long as 
Jesus is appealed to, the appeal is made with greater 
or less force to each and all of these grand principles, 
so illustriously are they represented by him. 

Everything else in the Christian church can, and 
should, vary unceasingly : from this immovable founda- 
tion w^ill arise an infinite multitude of transformations, 
of new applications, of developments yet imknown ; 
but this foundation itself will never change. In short, 
there will never be proposed to the activity of man a 
task more vast or more necessary than the duty of be- 
coming perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect. Man 
is always to love God above all else, and to recognize 
in his brother the same rights that he himself possesses : 
he cannot do without pardon ; he will forever need new 
life, progress, the communication of the divine Spirit. 

This unchangeable character of Christianity, con- 
sidered in itself, independently of the forms in which 
it may be clothed, has been boldly claimed by its 
founder : ^^ Heaven and earth shall pass away^ but my 
words shall not pass awayT And in the same sense, 
one of the authors of the New Testament has said of 
him, in language almost as imposing as his own, 
'•'•yesus Christy the same yesterday^ to-day^ aizd for- 

everJ^ * 

* Matt. xxiv. 35. Heb. xiii. 8. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 77 

IV. 

We have set forth, with as much precision as pos- 
sible, the teaching of Jesus, and have completed the 
analysis of his doctrines by delineating his character, 
w^hich is their most magnificent justification. It 
might be remarked, that among the essential ele- 
ments of his Christianity w^e have not placed in the 
first rank his divinity, his miracles, or his resurrec- 
tion. But these are doctrines v^hich do not affect the 
human conscience ; opinions or facts independent of 
the reign of God in our hearts ; alien, whatever one 
may believe about them, to our inner religious and 
moral life. Jesus has declared as saved, pardoned, 
received into the kingdom of God, admitted to Para- 
dise, believers who had never heard him speak of his 
divinity, never seen his miracles, nor had any concep- 
tion of his resurrection. He did not speak of these 
things to the sick consciences which he regenerated ; 
it was especially in speaking to them of God and of 
themselves that he converted them. It belongs to 
history, to religious science, to decide historical ques- 
tions ; but it was with religion properly so called, it 
was with direct relations to God, that Jesus nurtured 
consciences ; it is by these alone that they can live. 
Thus, in fully recognizing that in Jesus dwelt, in a 
peculiar and exceptional manner, the divine spirit. 



78 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

and that he had a right to say, '-'-I aiid my Father are 
one;^^^ in admitting that he performed cures by his 
word only ; in teaching, finally, that he rose from the 
dead, and that after his death his disciples saw him 
alive in the midst of them — we do not impose our 
convictions upon any one, nor do we refuse the name 
of Christian to those who think otherwise on these great 
questions. We declare that we know Christians, full 
of true faith and true charity, who deny them ; and we 
are sure of remaining loyal to the real thought of 
Jesus, and his real will, in recognizing such Chris- 
tians as brethren — as having the same right with 
ourselves, and with every other, to the title of disciples 
of Christ, to participation in the Holy Supper, and 
in all the offices which are exercised in the church, 
including the gospel ministry. 

Another delicate question, which we have deferred 
to the end of this chapter, so as not to interrupt the 
continuity of Jesus' teachings, concerns the idea which 
the Jews had formed of the Messiah whom they were 
expecting. The term kmgdom of God was bor- 
rowed by Jesus from Israelitish prophets, and from 
the popular hopes of his countrymen ; for them the ^ 
kingdom of heaven, or of God, was the universal 
monarchy passing from Rome to Jerusalem, and 
I^ael becoming the theocratic sovereign of the sub- \ 

* John X. 30. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 79 

JLigated and converted nations. The Messiah, son 
of David, was to judge the living and the risen dead 
in the valley of Jehoshaphat, near Jerusalem, after 
w^hich he was to reign a thousand years over the 
whole human race. It is indisputable that Jesus, in 
proclaiming himself the spiritual Messiah, passed 
beyond these too egoistic and too material ideas of 
his fellow-citizens ; that the universal and interior 
reign of God, as he understood it, did not in the least 
resemble what the Jews designated by the same term. 
However, if we take all his discourses literally, and, 
like all the Orthodox, regard them as having been 
pronounced word for word by him as they have come 
down to us, we shall be forced to admit that he shared 
the illusions of his surroundings, that he confounded 
the end of the world with the imminent destruction 
of Jerusalem, and that he hoped to return upon the 
earth speedily and miraculously, in order to establish 
there, during the life of the then existing generation, 
a theocratic and universal monarchy. His apostles 
and his biographers did not doubt that all these things 
should come to pass, and they unconsciously put into 
his mouth their own expectations on this point.* The 
difficulty is radically insoluble for orthodoxy, which 
admits at once the absolute divinity of Jesus, and the 
absolute exactness and inspired infallibility of the 

* Matt. xxvi. 



So FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Gospels ; but it is sumcient to read any discourse, 
any parable, any fact as reported by two evan- 
gelists, by three, or all four of them, and, what is 
still more decisive, it is sufficient to read the same 
narrative, reported two or three times by the same 
author, in order to become assured that all this has 
come down to us only through oral tradition, and 
with the impress, more or less distinct, of the ideas 
and language of the writer. It cannot be denied that 
the disciples often gave a too Judaical and material 
signification to what the Master said to them in a 
larger and more general sense ; he frequently re- 
proached them for their dulness, and in many instances 
we see that they repeat what he has said to them 
without any, or, at most, wath only a partial, compre- 
hension of his words. 

The generally-received dogma of eternal punish- 
ment, too, — another stone of stumbling to all ortho- 
doxies, — is really the ense?nble of Jewish conceptions 
of the future destiny of the human race. If the words 
are to be taken in the orthodox sense, — that is, literal- 
ly and abstractly, — Jesus taught eternal punishment. 
And yet this dogma is the formal negation of all justice 
and all goodness in God. It shocks conscience, and 
revolts faith ; and in the presence of such a doctrine 
we do not hesitate to pronounce the non fossumus 
which has elsewhere been so much abused. Respect 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 8l 

and love for God should forbid us to believe it. There 
is nothing arbitrary in this refusal. If Jesus himself 
has ratified the rights of conscience, it ought to use 
those rights. It is evident, besides, that no one dares 
any longer to defend this atrocious dogma, and that 
the orthodoxy of all the churches preserves respecting 
it a discreet silence, knowing well that they would 
lose in universal estimation if they should dare to 
speak of it. In our opinion, the original term trans- 
lated eternal is much more vague in the semi-Hebraic 
Greek of the New Testament, and would be trans- 
lated more exactly by seculai^^ ceonian^ or some simi- 
lar word. Only a soul eternally obstinate in remaining 
miserable and bad would be deserving of eternal 
punishment ; but this hypothesis itself is, in our eyes, 
only a pure abstraction. If that is the meaning 
of the text, it loses what rendered it unacceptable. 
But if it should be proved to us that an utterance 
of Jesus may favor the terrible idea of an eternal hell, 
still we w^ould fearlessly appeal from his words to 
himself, from an obscure saying to the totality of his 
lugiinous doctrine of love and pardon ; we would 
recall what he has also said : '-''The letter killeth^ btct 
the spirit giveth life ; the words that I speak ujzto 
you are spirit and life;^' and we would not cease to 
hope firmly, from the divine compassion, and from 
human perfectibility, for the salvation of all souls. 
6 



82 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER IV. 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE LAW OF TRANSFORMA- 
TION. 

" For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
which is Jesus Christ. Now, if any man build upon this 
foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, 
every man's work shall be manifest; for the day shall declare 
it." — I Cor. iii. 11-13. 

HAVING Studied the Christianity of Jesus Christ, 
we could wish to pass immediately to a descrip- 
tion of the modifications which his thought received In 
the hands of his different disciples ; but it is perhaps 
necessary, before pursuing our task, to remove an ill- 
founded scruple w^hlch will doubtless arise in certain 
minds. The Catholic notion of an orthodox or im- 
mutable Christianity is still very widely spread; 
many Protestants, not very faithful to the principle 
of the Reformation, and even certain philosophers, 
have not yet understood that Christianity, while pos- 
sessing a fixed foundation, is essentially variable in 
its mtellectual and external forms, in its theoretical 
developments and in its applications. The idea of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 83 

Christian transformations is a scandal for some, and 
a contradiction for others. 

We believe we have demonstrated that the very- 
idea of an Orthodox or absolute religion is radically 
false. The reply comes from tw^o sides at once, that 
it is, nevertheless, a Christian idea ; w^hich proves, 
according to the Orthodox, that we have deceived 
ourselves, and, according to the philosophers, that 
Christianity is infected with one of the gravest errors. 

The question can be discussed in a general and 
abstract manner. It may be replied to our Orthodox 
by the well-deserved reproach made by Channing — 
The Tnajority of p7^otestants jight Catholicism ii7tder 
its own flag. It is necessary to remind them that 
every religion has two factors, God and man ; in other 
words, the truth, and the human mind, which, more or 
less perfectly^ grasps this truth. When any religion 
claims to have only God for Father, and to reach us 
without passing through minds like our own, it labors 
under a mere illusion ; this is not an imposture, to 
be sure, but a chimera. Everything has been done to 
impart to Christianity the character of an absolute 
religion. It was thought that this end would be 
attained by making Jesus equal to the Father. But 
Jesus wrote nothing ; and all that we know of him 
comes to us through men — evangelists and apostles. 
It was thought to settle the difficulty by supposing 



34 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

that these sacred authors w^rote under the dictation of 
God. But their divergencies, their contradictions, 
certain errors of fact, have rendered this position 
untenable ; and, moreover, the interpretation of the 
sacred books has raised a v^hole vs^orld of difficulties 
and of variations. An attempt has been made to 
attain the absolute through the authority of the 
church ; and the infallibility which had already passed 
from Jesus to the apostles has been transmitted from 
the apostles either to the councils or to the pope, or to 
the pope united w^ith the councils : the church claim- 
ing authority has never been able to say where this 
authority resides ; and even the partisans of its in- 
fallibility have adopted in our days, under the eyes of 
Pius IX., and by the pen of the Jesuit Perrone, the 
idea of the development of doctrine. 

In short, it is impossible to deny that Christianity, 
even in its most authoritative form, develops un- 
ceasingly, and, like everything else, either progresses 
or retrogrades. History asserts this fact beyond all 
dispute ; and to the question whether Christianity is 
capable of transformation, it is enough to reply that 
it has been transformed in every age, and is being 
transformed in our very presence. 

Even the idea of revelation contains nothing con- 
trary to that which we here set forth. All truth, 
however divine it may be, is developed in two ways, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 85 

which are essentially one — by purifying constantly 
the human elements which it necessarily contains, and 
freeing itself from them ; by bearing its own fruits, by 
bringing to light its legitimate consequences, and 
giving itself up to them more completely. No truth 
is sterile. 

It may be asked what was Jesus' thought on this 
point ; but the answer cannot be doubtful. No one 
ever made a bolder Appeal to free conscience than he. 
No one ever said to the human mind with a more 
intrepid trust in the truth, '-'-Seek and ye shall JindJ^ 
This intermingling of extreme boldness with infinite 
tenderness for troubled souls is a distinctive character- 
istic of Jesus. He opens to investigation the realm 
of the infinite, ana shows high respect for the illimita- 
ble rights of thought in the pursuit of the true ; but 
at the same time that he displays a sublime confidence 
in the power of truth and in the aptitude of the human 
soul for knowing and loving it, he appreciates with 
infinite delicacy the anguish, the misery, the modesty, 
the holy ambition of the human heart. He sows in the 
minds of men, and then leaves them to nourish the 
grain in its deep furrow. All individualities have 
their legitimate career. No uniform yoke, no dry and 
rigid rule, is imposed upon them. Thus never did 
burning wax receive its impress so easily and faith- 
fully as Christian truth has assimilated to all characters, 
all races, all epochs. 



86 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Not only Is it a fact that there are as many Chris- 
tianities as Christians, but Jesus has taken great care 
and pains that it should be so. See him, with a 
tender and watchful solicitude, defending every spon- 
taneous expression of love and of faith, against the 
orthodox rigidity of the Jews, and the narrowness of 
his own disciples.* He made others feel at ease with 
him ; and while many times a great character has 
levelled all who surrounded him, and imparted to 
them his own tint, the two Johns, Peter, Martha, 
and Mary, preserved entirely, though by the side of 
Jesus and in his shadow, the full originality of their 
natures, the free diversity of their characters. 

Did he ever speak of his religion as of a finished 
doctrine, of his gospel as of what is called a closed 
protocol? Never. The figures by which he con- 
stantly represents the Christian life, the reign of God 
in us, and the destinies of his church, are borrowed 
from living nature : the germination of vegetation ; 
the good grain which grows mingled with tares ; 
the little seed which becomes a great tree ; the fruit 
ripening on the branch ; the leaven which ferments 
and expands the whole lump ; the living water be- 

* " Let her alone ; " " Forbid him not ; " " Suffer the little 
childre7i to come luito me : " '"''Condemn not ; " " Judge not : " 
it is thus that he recognizes the free expansions of the rehgious 
Hfe, and causes them to be respected. John xii. 7. Mark ix. 
39; X. 14. Luke vii. 36-50. Matt. vii. i, &c. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 87 

coming a fountain, and springing up into eternal life ; 
the fire which diffuses itself; the money well invested, 
which increases by accumulated interest and by labor. 

In the Gospel according to St. John he announces, 
several times and in various ways, the future develop- 
ments of his doctrine. He declares to his disciples, on 
the eve of his death, that he has yet many things to 
say unto them^ bitt that they cannot bear them now ; * 
he repeats to them that the Spirit, the Co?nforter 
(Paraclete), will teach them things which, as yet, they 
are ignorant of.f He astonishes the Twelve by these 
solemn and profound words : " Verily^ verily^ I say 
unto you^ He that believeth 07z me^ the works that I 
do he shall do also^ and greater works than these 
shall he do; because I go unto my Father T \ It 
seems to us impossible to express more boldly than in 
these formal and frequent declarations the eminently 
progressive character of Christianity. 

The contrast is striking between so many religions 
which pretend from the first day to have said all, and 
the Christian religion, which never ceases to impel 
souls onward and upward in the knowledge of the 
truth. 

This is why Jesus, comprehending in its height and 
totality the future of the reign of God, did not bind it 
to any fonn, code, or creed, which, in order to be 

*Johnxvi. 12. t John xiv. 16 and 26 ; XV. 26. JJohnxiv. 12. 



88 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

intelligible and admissible, would have to bear the 
transient and local impress of circumstances. He 
reserved, w^ith a constant solicitude, all the progress 
and freedom of the future. Consequently, wdioever 
pretends to freeze and fix under a given form the 
inexhaustible current of Christian life and truth, is in 
direct opposition to the will of the Master and to that 
improvement, without other limit than the divine per- 
fection, which is the very essence of Christianity. 

Let us reestablish the facts. This so liberal doc- 
trine of Jesus was constantly misconceived. In all 
ages, Christians, convinced, but only partially en- 
lightened, have wished to make of their imperfect 
teaching what he never made of his — an unchangeable 
rule, the absolute source of all truth. They have con- 
stantly attempted to reinstate in the church the three 
scourges of Mosaism — the spirit of legality, the priestly 
spirit, and the worship of the letter. But also there 
have appeared, from time to time, in the bosom of 
Christianity, men of faith, who, feeling that the mo- 
ment of a transformation had come, have essayed to 
restore the grand principles of Christianity in their 
primitive purity by freeing them from illegitimate 
additions, and have endeavored to respond to the 
actual and increasing wants of souls. In such cases, 
those whom God employs to eflect a necessary re- 
form always begin by having the great majority of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 89 

Christians in decided opposition to their spirit and 
acts. It cannot be otherwise. Neither the world nor 
the churches like to be disturbed in their repose or in 
their habits. The first in whom are manifested the 
Christian aspirations of their time are always in the 
minority, and never fail to stir up the majority against 
their words. They are accused of attempting innova- 
tions. Those who do not comprehend them, seeing 
that a portion of the doctrines hitherto believed have 
become unsettled through their efforts, declare them 
sacrilegists and blasphemers, and would crucify them, 
if they could, for the greater glory of God and the 
good of souls. Even the adversaries of religion, who 
have only the traditional conception of its claims, re- 
gard them as inconsequent, and accuse them of com- 
ing out of their church without declaring themselves 
against it. Finally, those who comprehend them less 
imperfectly, but who are wanting in courage or in 
intelligence, blame them as impatient, look upon them 
with hatred as compromising their brethren, or even 
denounce them to the civil authorities as anarchists 
and subverters. 

All this changes with time : the minority of yester- 
day will be the majority of to-morrow ; and all that 
men can accomplish against a progress w^hose hour 
has come, only serves to hasten it. But the resistance 
which routine and spiritual poverty oppose to the de- 



90 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

velopments of triitli ought not to astonish any one. It 
is to be expected ; it has been so from Jesus Christ 
down to our own days. The continuance of this im- 
potent struggle against God could be foreseen. The 
only feeling worthy of a Christian towards those who 
sincerely combat the spirit through love of the letter, 
and thereby make war against God, is a charitable pity. 
This feeling should be carried to such a height as to 
exclude anger, and be lifted, if possible, into a region 
so serene that even contempt may not approach. 

Let us now resume our historical study ; and, with- 
out listening to the different Orthodoxies of which each 
claims to shov/ us its own system in Jesus, and to re- 
discover it there, identical w4th him in all ages, let us 
without prejudice observe the facts in the complicated 
richness and variety of their manifestations. Instead 
of seeing a machinery directed by the priestly or the 
sectarian spirit working under our eyes, we shall wit- 
ness the free movements of spiritual life ; that is, the 
varied aspirations of Christian humanity, seeking, in 
the footsteps of its Master, but at its own risk, truth, 
holiness, and love. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



9^ 



CHAPTER V. 

JUDAICAL CHRISTIANITY. 

" Since religion cannot be constituted into a church without 
becoming an external fact, from the internal fact that it was, 
it necessarily follows that it thereby becomes, in a certain de- 
gree, less true." — NitzscJi. 

AMONG the paintings of the old Byzantine basili- 
cas is usually seen, on the semicircular arch 
which separates the nave from the apsis, the figures of 
thirteen lambs, one of which, in the centre, bearing a 
cross, often wounded to death, represents Jesus ; w^hile 
from each side six others, exactly similar, are advan- 
cing towards him with the same step. This naive sym- 
bol expresses precisely the notion which the church 
wished to entertain respecting its origin, and the com- 
plete uniformity which it supposed among the apostles. 
Nothing is more at variance with history than such a 
presumption. Among the twelve, or rather fifteen, 
apostles, there are some absolutely unknown, whose 
names, even, have remained doubtful ; while some 

318 



92 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

other, by his extraordinary genius and activity, has 
been one of the three or four persons who have exerted 
the deepest and broadest influence upon the future of 
humanity. Besides, it is an unintelhgible fiction to 
confine to the apostles alone the active life and direc- 
tion of primitive Christianity. It w^ill soon be seen 
that the case w^as far otherwise. 

The reign of God^ freely preached by Jesus on the 
Galilean hills, before a mobile and mixed population, 
was afterwards proclaimed by him in Judea, and in 
the Temple at Jerusalem. There his auditors belonged 
to the most indomitable of all races, exclusive by prin- 
ciple and by passion, formalist by education and by 
taste, heroic in its obstinate fidelity to its cult, but in- 
sane in its dreams of domination and of vengeance. A 
portion of this people saw in Jesus the Messiah^ the 
Son of David^ the King who was coming in the 
name of the Lord, Won by his touching goodness, 
impressed by the loftiness of his character and his 
piety, these Jews believed in him ; but in spite of his 
words of peace, in spite of his doctrine of love and 
pity, they renounced neither their chimera of a uni- 
versal theocracy, nor their hopes of retaliation upon 
their enemies. Christian spiritualism prevailed only 
among the best, and mollified the barbarous illusions 
of the Israelitish Messiahship, without, however, dissi- 
pating them. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 93 

After these disciples were left alone, they awaited 
the Tia^ovata^ that is, the victorious manifestation of 
Christ, his almost immediate return, and the end of the 
actual world. It is not possible to deny the influence 
of this error upon the first Christians, who, believing 
the destruction of all things to be at hand, with an in- 
considerate zeal and an extravagant renunciation of 
the goods of earth, sold all that they possessed, and 
gave it to the poor. This communism, although it 
w^as never general nor compulsory, caused in the 
church of Jerusalem such cruel want, that it soon be- 
came necessary to make collections in its behalf from 
province to province, in proportion as the Roinan 
world became initiated into evangelical Christianity. 

Two books of the New Testament are very curious 
monuments of this Judaizing Christianity. The first 
is the Apocalypse ; the second, the Epistle of St. 
James, 

The Apocalypse, the first of all the Christian books 
generally received into the church, and the one which 
became, as it were, the nucleus of the new canon, 
dates from the reign of the Emperor Galba, which 
lasted only three months in the yqar 68. This writing 
belongs to a kind of literature greatly enjoyed and 
much cultivated by the Jews. Indeed, there are in 
existence several other Apocalypses — that of Daniel, 
which forms a part of the Old Testament ; that of 



94 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Enoch, which has never been admitted to the canon, 
but which is also extant in Hebrew ; and that which 
bears the false title of the Fourth Book of Esdras, and 
is written in Greek. In a style eminently Oriental 
and Judaical, full of figures, visions, enigmas familiar 
to his readers, and in a long series of vast dramatic 
pictures, the author consoles and reassures the already 
cruelly persecuted Christians.* He affirms that Chris- 
tianity will win the victory over its powerful rivals. 
Paganism and Judaism, both bent on its destruction. 
It represents the paganism of the time of Nero under 
the figure of the city upon seven hills, the harlot 
clothed in purple and scarlet, and drunk with the 
blood of the saints ; but it disguises the name of Rome 
under the pseudonyme of Mystery^ or Babylon, Juda- 
ism, or Jerusalem, is scourged under the designation 
of Sodom^ w^hile the religion of Christ is called the 
New Jerusalem, 

The author formally predicts that in three years and 
a half, — that is, in the year 72, — Jesus was suddenly 
to return to the world to triumph definitely over all his 
enemies, and to reign during a thousand years over the 
entire earth, surrounded by Christians, some still liv- 
ing, others dead, but risen, f 

* Chapters vi. and viii. 

t Rev. xi. 2,3; xii. 3, 6, 14. See also i. i, 3; ii. 5> 16; xxii. 
6j 7, 10, 12, 20; iii. 11; xi. 14. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



95 



This book, which seems to us so strange, had a great 
success, and contributed powerfully to sustain the 
courage of the church, still young, but already ex- 
posed to atrocious persecutions. 

The Epistle of St. James, surnamed the Just^ shows 
us the Judaizing spirit of the church under another 
form. There is reason to believe that the author of 
this writing was one of the four brothers of Jesus, all 
of whom were very late in accepting his religion. 
The historian Hegesippus has drawn an almost fright- 
ful picture of the excessive austerities and continual 
prayers which he attributes to this saintly personage. 
His Epistle is wholly moral and practical ; mysticism 
and dogmatism are equally w^anting in it. But the 
motive upon which James insists the most strongly, 
in order to exact a strict fidelity to duty, is the nearness 
of the return of Jesus, and the fearful rigor of the sen- 
tence which he is soon to pronounce upon the quick 
and the dead.* Full of practical sense, little inclined 
to any form of mysticism, James had become a Chris- 
tian, and pastor or bishop of Jerusalem, without re- 
nouncing either his Israelitic mode of thinking, or, 
very probably, his observance of the Law. He did 
not at all admit that faith without works could be of 
saving efficacy ; he declared it dead, and did not un- 
derstand the teaching of Paul on this subject. 

* James v. 7-9; ii. 13; i. 9, &c. 



96 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

His ironical and piquant utterance becomes at 
times a dialogue, a short, comic scene, full of incisive 
animation.* Besides'being a bishop of the first days, 
James the Just is a sfiritiiel moralist, reminding one 
of La Bruyere. According to his teaching, '-'•Pu^^e 
religion^ and undefiled^ befo7'e God a7id the Father^ 
is this^ To visit the fatherless aiid widows in their 
affliction^ and to keep himself unspotted frofn the 
world''' t 

Never, perhaps, was Christianity less dogmatic than 
in the case of this brother of Jesus, and first pastor of 
Jerusalem. Therefore, of all the books of the New 
Testament, his Epistle is least enjoyed by the Ortho- 
dox ; and it is known that Luther went so far as to 
call it an epistle of straw ^ because he found it con- 
trary to his principal dogma. Nor do we consider 
the doctrine of James as either logical or sufficient : 
we see therein the great thought of Jesus retrenched 
and impoverished by the legal principle of Mosaism. 
The Christianity of James was only half emancipated 
from the trammels of the law ; it was a lower grade 
of Christianity, which did not contain in germ all the 
future developments of Christian truth. It is doubtful 
whether this Epistle has ever converted any one. For 
the regeneration of humanity there was necessary a 
wholly diflferent warmth of soul, and a force of expan- 

* James ii. 1-5, 11-17. f James i. 27. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 97 

sion much more powerful than that of a wise moralist, 
however religious and austere he might be. 

However, many other Mosaic elements passed into 
Christianity, beyond what the two Judaizing Chris- 
tians of whom we have just spoken would, probably, 
have desired. Secular habits gained the ascendency : 
a weak human conscience delights to impose upon 
itself external duties, or create for itself imaginary 
merits ; it is difficult to do without these leading- 
strings when one has been a long time sustained by 
them. Fasts, distinction of forbidden meats and of 
sacred days, obtained increasing favor in the Judaizing 
church. Another characteristic abuse, against which 
St. Paul afterwards raised his voice,* passed from 
Judaism into Christianity, although it was formally 
condemned in the Apocalypse : this was the worship 
of angels — a superstition to which Israel had allowed 
itself to be won during its long captivity in the Baby- 
lonian states. This error was subsequently accepted 
by the Christians converted from paganism, all the 
more readily because it harmonized only too w^ell 
with the honors rendered by polytheism to good and 
evil genii — honors which were to be traced to the 
same Oriental origin, although derived from it through 
another channel. 

In still two other points Judaism began to corrupt 

* Col. ii. 18. 
7 



98 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

the primitive purity of Jesus' teaching ; and both 
these corruptions, like the preceding ones, were en- 
couraged and propagated by converted pagans. One 
was the introduction of the hierarchy into the bosom 
of Christianity. Israel had had a sacerdotal body, 
surrounded with honors by Moses, but maintained by 
him in strict subordination to law, and compelled to 
subsist upon the tithe of others' revenues, being alone 
deprived of territorial possessions, in the midst of a 
people who had divided among themselves a con- 
quered country. 

This hierarchy was gradually imitated by the church, 
the more readily because the pagan cults had also pos- 
sessed powerful religious corporations. The titles of 
pastors and inspectors, or bishops, at first equal and 
identical,* became different and hierarchically classified 
titles. Later, the clergy caused the Mosaic tithe to be 
given them, as instituted by God, but without renoun- 
cing either property or heritage, and as members of a 
social state wherein each citizen, born a proprietor, 
was no longer obliged to set aside a tenth part of the 
products of his land for the benefit of a body for- 
bidden to hold such possessions. 

A third Israelitish importation, favored equally by 
the language and the rites of all the pagan nations, 
was the application to the death of Jesus of the idea 

* I Peter v. i. Titus i. 7, &c. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 99 

and name of sacrifice. We shall return to this sub- 
ject, with more details, in speaking of Roman Chris- 
tianity ; but we must at least note it here, and point 
out the fact that a very natural analogy was soon 
established between the Jewish passover and the death 
of Christ ; between .the Israelitish festival of pascha 
and the Last Supper. The yearly immolation of the 
paschal lamb, sacrificed and eaten by each Jewish 
family, in remembrance of, and thanksgiving for, the 
deliverance out of Egypt, could not fail to be placed 
in parallel wuth the immolation of Jesus, which took 
place precisely on the eve of that great national feast. 
This analogy was discovered all the more easily be- 
cause the Jews were accustomed to apply to the 
Messiah the beautiful words in which Isaiah describes 
the servant of Jehovah under the symbol of the sheep 
shorn, or the lamb slaughtered — a symbol which John 
the Baptist, the last of the prophets, had himself 
applied to Jesus from the very first days of the Savior's 
career.* 

To recapitulate : Judaizing Christianity, this first 
transformation of the Christian type, was a limitation 
of, and a direct degeneracy from, the teaching of the 
Master. Jesus had placed himself at a point of view 

* It must be observed, however, that the paschal lamb was 
never a victim of expiation, but always of thank-offering — 
a wholly different thing. 



lOO FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

too high and too general for the limited perceptions 
of his followers. Neither in the assembly of his dis- 
ciples, nor in the more intimate circle of the Twelve, 
not even in his own family when it had become Chris- 
tian, was there any one able to follow him on a 
ground so high. The hopes of his age and of his 
people, their lively preference for a precise law and 
for material works, their superstitious habits of absti- 
nence, their formalism, their sacerdotal spirit, their 
inveterate custom of appeasing and honoring God by 
sacrifices, acquired ascendency in their souls, or, rather, 
never let go its hold. Moreover, the invasion of 
Judaical ideas, by abasing Christianity below the 
primitive level, rendered it more acceptable to the 
polytheistic races, who discerned in it, at least in 
germ, the universal idea of sacrifice, the hierarchy, 
the worship of good angels, and the fear of evil spirits 
— all beliefs in which Jews and Christians had lived 
for many ages. 

Less grave, doubtless, in James and in the author 
of the Apocalypse, than among many others, this fall- 
ing away became sufficiently serious to compromise 
the future of the religion of the Crucified. The 
church was, in the eyes of certain Christians, and of 
their adversaries, only one Jewish sect the more. 
Stumbling upon this fatal declivity, it would have 
annihilated itself; at any rate, it may be said that the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. lOI 

attachment of the Judaizing Christians to a local and 
national legislation rendered them unfit to convert the 
world, and that their cold and rigid wisdom was not 
capable of regenerating humanity. Even religious 
moralists scarcely persuade any except those who are 
already of their opinion. It needed strong souls, 
and a doctrine of a wholly different fire and passion, 
to conquer the Roman empire. 

Besides, the emancipating thought of the Master 
could not perish. It had broken its bonds even 
before the entrance of the first pagan proselytes into 
the church. The torch of the Spirit was raised again 
by the first of the martyrs, and passed from his dying 
hand to that of the greatest of the apostles, to en- 
lighten the world with a more brilliant and a warmer 
light. The Christian spirit was still too far in ad- 
vance of the age, in spite of all the preparations 
which we have enumerated ; and it was precisely by 
reason of its grandeur and purity, that in less than 
four years after the death of Jesus, Christianity already 
needed reform and a reformer. 



I02 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER VI. 

HELLENISTIC CHRISTIANITY. 

" Doubtless error can play its part, like owls in the night. 
But we should sooner expect the owls to cause the terrified 
sun to retire to the east, than to see the truth, once recognized 
and proclaimed, to be so repressed as that ancient error might 
recover its lost ground, and reestablish itself there in peace." 
— Schopenhauer. 

STRANGELY enough, the reformer who pre- 
sented himself was neither one of the Twelve, 
nor the pastor of Jerusalem, nor one of the brothers 
of Christ, nor one of those Galileans who had fol- 
lowed the Master from the beginning, and among 
whom alone an apostle was chosen in the place of 
Judas. From the second day of the history of Chris- 
tianity, " the Spirit bloweth where it listeth^' breaks 
over all official bounds, and creates for itself new 
instruments. 

Beneath and beside the influence of James, perhaps 
before that influence had been firmly established, and 
more than thirty years before the Apocalypse was 
written, a wholly diflferent movement had begun at 
Jerusalem itself. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. IO3 

We take this occasion for declaring that we are not 
wi'iting one of those chronicles in which each fact, 
even secondar}^, appears only at its date. Whenever 
it shall be necessary, in order to set forth each trans- 
formation of Christianity, w^e shall go back to the 
epoch when it began to manifest itself with a certain 
degree of energy and publicity ; and we shall then 
record the essential facts of its development in the 
order in which they occurred ; but it will be seen 
that the evolutions of several of these forms of Chris- 
tianity were simultaneous, even when they remained 
independent of each other. 

Persecution had not yet commenced. The pagan 
world still ignored the nascent church, and for a long 
time afterwards confounded it with Judaism.* The 
Pharisees, always politic, showed little hostility to the 
disciples of him who had so severely stigmatized them, 
and whose violent death they had done so much to 
bring about. Especially occupied at this time in 
combating the anti-national Epicureanism of the 

* Claudius, called Suetonius, banished from Rome the 
Jews, who, at the instigation of Chrestus, caused frequent 
disturbances there {171 Claud, 25). M. Salvador vainly essays 
to demonstrate that the question here is concerning Jews alone 
and their Messianic hopes. {Domhiation rom. en Jud. I. p. 
501.) This is an error. Claudius and his historian do not 
discriminate here between the Christians and the Jews, and 
the name of Christ, inaccurately reported, is for them that 
of a fomenter of troubles. 



I04 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Sadducees, they saw in the adherents of the Nazarene 
an entirely inoffensive sect, which, by its ardent faith 
in eternal life, and perhaps also by its Messianic 
hopes, might serve them as a weapon against the 
materialism of their rivals. In the multitude of 
Jewish schools, that of Jesus was regarded by the 
others as a strange group of dreamers, who, instead 
of awaiting the coming of a new Messiah, hoped for 
the return of theirs. The Christian antagonism of 
the letter and the spirit, of the law and the life, was 
scarcely felt. 

But it is only to the Jews of Palestine, and to the 
Christians who issued from their ranks, that all this 
applies. We have already had occasion to signalize 
Jews wholly different, relatively emancipated from the 
prejudices of their people, and known in Judea under 
the contemptuous name of Hellenists, Very numer- 
ous, even in the Holy City, towards which, like all 
their brethren according to the flesh, they gravitated 
as towards a common centre, they possessed there 
several synagogues.* More free from Mosaic tram- 
mels, and more fully initiated into the common life 
of the people of that time, many among them became 
Christians. This disunion among the Jews could 
not fail to become a seed of trouble in the very 
bosom of the primitive church. Rivalries and 

* Acts vi. 19. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. IO5 

mutual reproaches of narrowness or lukewarmness 
began at this period, and have never ceased to be heard 
on both sides. A contention arose respecting the dis- 
tribution of provisions among the poor w^idows of 
Judaizing Christians and those of Hellenistic Chris- 
tians, each party considering itself w^ronged. So 
quick was discord to spring up among the Christians, 
and precisely in reference to that v^hich ought to have 
united them all — charity ! 

The Twelve, absorbed in the duties of teaching, 
proposed that the distribution of relief should be in- 
trusted to servants of the poor, or deacons. The idea 
was adopted by all, and the universal suffrage of the 
church of Jerusalem elected seven deacons. It ap- 
pears that, in an admirable spirit of conciliation and 
fraternity, — too rarely imitated since, — they agreed 
to choose all the deacons from among those who had 
complained — the Hellenists ; for all seven bear Greek 
names, which the Jews of Palestine, for the most part, 
avoided giving to their children. 

The deacons did not confine themselves to the care 
of the poor. One of those elected, Stephen, a man 
full of faith and of the Holy Ghost ^ distinguished 
himself in the society by the wonderful power of his 
speech. His bold, sympathetic, and captivating elo- 
quence responded better to the wants of souls than 
did the more reserved instruction of the apostles ; he 



Io6 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

converted a great number of Israelites, and even of 
priests, precisely because he attacked Judaism so fear- 
lessly. He did not cease, said his denunciators, to 
speak against the holy place and the law,^ Since 
Stephen had emancipated consciences from the yoke 
of the Mosaic law, by renouncing the material 
worship of Jehovah and His sole altar, the people, 
scandalized, excited to revolt by their priests and 
doctors, accused him, before the assembled Sanhe- 
drim, of blasphemy. 

In the presence of that council his defence consisted 
in forgetting his own affairs in order to fulminate a 
long and overwhelming speech against the Israelites, 
their idolatry, their hardness of heart, and the resist- 
ance which at all times they had made to the spirit. 
When, in descending the course of national history, 
he had come from Abraham to Solomon, and to the 

* Luke, it is true, calls those who thus accused Stephen 
false witnesses ; but he himself fully justifies their accusation 
in the long discourse of Stephen which he reports. Luke 
evidently feels that he must treat the Judaizing Christians with 
circumspection in his narrative. This fact had already pre- 
sented itself in respect to Jesus himself. The Evangelists 
even in reporting his most energetic words, would not allow 
that he was speaking against the Temple, and they treated as 
caluminators those who explained in this sense discourses 
which, in spite of the benevolent interpretation given by the 
Evangelists, cannot mean anything else. There, as else- 
where, Jesus was too superior to be understood even by his 
own. Compare John ii. 19-21. Matt. xxvi. 60. Mark xiv. 58. 



I 



OF CHRISTIANITY. IO7 

building of the sanctuary of which they were so 
proud, he indignantly protested against the assump- 
tion that the Most High, the Creator of all things, 
would condescend to dwell in a temple made by 
human hands. After having thus, with great energy, 
freed Christian universalism from the narrow fetters 
of Judaism, he burst forth into terrible reproaches, into 
withering invectives against the Jews, accusing them 
of the martyrdom of the prophets and of the murder 
of Jesus. At this last word they interrupted him on 
all sides, gnashing the teeth and uttering cries of 
rage. Then, remembering what Jesus had suffered 
before him from this same tribunal, he became exalted 
by this idea ; he was willing to brave their fury ; he 
was transported with intrepid ecstasy and faith, and in 
the midst of that Sanhedrim which had condemned 
the Holy One and the Just to death, he cried out with 
uplifted eyes, " / see the heavens opened^ and the 
Son of man standing on the right hand of GodT 
A frightful tumult burst forth around him. All pres- 
ent, without w^aiting for any form of trial or condem- 
nation, cried out, with one accord, that they were 
witnesses of his blasphemy. Senators and bystanders 
threw themselves in a crowd upon him, and dragged 
him without the walls to stone him. From that 
moment the impetuous assailant became a lamb. He 



Io8 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

died full of calmness, imitating the death of his Mas- 
ter, and, like him, pardoning his enemies. 

'-''And devout men carried Stephen to his burial^ 
a7id made great lamentation over him ; " but it would 
be a mistake to suppose that the mourning was every- 
where as grievous as in the bosom of the church. No 
doubt Stephen appeared to the Judaizing Christians as 
the most imprudent and the most compromising of the 
allies ; and not without reason, for his proselytism and 
his preaching changed the dispositions of the Pharisee 
party, and exasperated the Sanhedrim, and his death 
became the signal of the first persecution that ravaged 
the church. 

But the blood of the first martyr was already found 
to be the seed of the church. The fugitives carried 
the gospel into Phenicia, the Isle of Cyprus, and the 
brilliant metropolis of Syria, the city of Antioch ; 
there, finally, some of them dared to preach the new 
religion, not only to the Hellenistic Jews, but to the 
pagans themselves. The disciples gradually became 
so numerous in this populous and cultivated capital, 
that it devolved upon public opinion to give them a 
name. This name, created by the popular thought, 
was admirably chosen ; it was that which we still 
bear ; these disciples, filled with the spirit of the 
Master, were called, after him, Christians. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. IO9 

We possess but few details concerning the doctrines 
which Stephen taught during his short but brilliant 
career. It is enough to know that in the very centre 
of Judaism, and at the Inoment when the nascent 
church seemed to fall away from its standard by ap- 
proaching too nearly again the ancient law, he pro- 
tested w^ith power against the Mosaic servitude and 
the monopoly of the Temple. Glorious protests, legiti- 
mate revolution, which he paid for with his blood and 
with the security which the church was enjoying ; but 
even at this price, an affranchisement so necessary was 
not too dearly bought. 

Stephen is everywhere known as the first Christian 
martyr. This is not, however, the only title of glory 
to which he has an exclusive right ; it is by no means 
through accident or chance that he stands in the first 
rank among those who have given their lives for the 
Christian faith. He received this honor and merited 
it because, more than any one else, he transformed the 
rising church and developed Christianity according to 
the spirit of Christ. He was the first Christian re- 
former ; and this is why his name remains inscribed 
at the head of the immense martyrology in which 
figure together those who have sacrificed their lives 
for the church, and those whom she herself, in days of 
delusion, has punished with death for having con- 



no FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

tinued, in spite of her, and in her own bosom, the 
work of the Master. 

The martyrdom of Stephen, so far from having im- 
poverished Christianity b;^ depriving it of so grand 
and intrepid a servant, only enriched it: Stephen in 
dying bequeathed to the church a greater reformer 
than himself. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. Ill 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE CHRISTIANITY OF ST. PAUL. 

^' It is a fact that, in the theology of Paul, the death of 
Christ is not the principal thing, the pivot of the system, but 
rather the faith of man ; and this faith does not refer exclu- 
sively to the fact of Christ's death, but still more to the fact 
of his life. The holiness of this life, which we are to appro- 
priate by faith, exercises upon our justification an influence 
as great as the sacrifice of his death." — Reuss^ Hist, de la 
TheoL chret. au Si^cle a^post. II. 192. 



WHENEVER, among the Jews, a blasphemy had 
been uttered, their cruel law made the witness- 
es of the crime the executioners of the criminal. The 
auditors of Stephen, in preparing to stone him, stripped 
themselves of their long robes, which would have im- 
peded their action, and left them at the feet of a young 
Pharisee, who, seated on the place of punishment, 
took charge of them, and thus consented^ although 
indirectly, to the murder of the martyr. What took 
place in the soul of Saul of Tarsus during his obser- 



112 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

vation of this sublime death? He could not himself 
have expressed his emotions. The martyrdom of 
Stephen was not the immediate cause of his conver- 
sion, but he could never console himself for having 
taken part in it. Struggling against feelings w^hich 
already thrilled his soul, but w^hich he w^as obliged to 
suppress as impious, he set out armed with letters 
from the chief priest to destroy at Damascus, by fire 
and sword, the abhorred sect of the Galilean. But 
his strong spirit was troubled, tortured to its inmost 
depths. His vigorous nature was so violently agitated 
that it passed from one extreme to the other. It could 
be carried away even to fanaticism, but could not fail 
in sincerity towards itself. Paul could be either an 
obstinate persecutor, or the most devoted of the 
apostles, but nothing less. That which cut short for 
him this terrible irresolution, and put an end at once 
and forever to all his doubts, was a vision. This 
argument was then as decisive for the best minds as 
it would be disputable to-day. Jesus appeared to 
Saul on the way to Damascus. Ananias, a Christian 
of that city, instructed and baptized this impetuous 
disciple, who the evening before would have put him 
to death. The neophyte abandoned his Jewish name 
of Saul^ and chose a Latin one. Paul afterwards 
became a greater apostle than any of the Twelve, and 
took his place among them in spite of their early 



OF CHRISTIANITY. II3 

distrust and the later disquietudes which they felt on 
account of what they considered his too positive ideas 
and over-bold proceedings. 

Paul was a man of genius, but he was essentially a 
man of his time. He had, in the highest degree, a 
quality which was generally lacking in that troubled 
age — decision. Incapable of admitting compromises, 
half measures, he devoted himself entirely, with body 
and soul, to the truth. Nor did his present good faith 
excuse, in his opinion, former mistakes ; he sincerely 
believed himself to be the chief of sinners for having 
persecuted Christ and his church, and never con- 
sidered that he had repaired that crime, notwith- 
standing the vast extent of his spiritual conquests 
and his long career of devotion amidst the greatest 
perils. 

The work of his life was the conversion of the 
human race, without distinction of origin, whether 
Jew or pagan, to the religion of Jesus Christ. 

Above all others he was the man for this immense 
work. Even his education had helped to prepare 
him for it. He was a Hellenistic Jew, born of 
Hebrew parents at Tarsus, a Greek city of Cilicia, 
which had received for its children the very useful 
title of Roman citizens. But he was educated at 
Jerusalem in the ultra-Israelitic doctrines of the Phari- 
sees. By reason of his origin he found himself on 
8 



114 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

the confines of two worlds ; he was by his race a Jew 
in rehgion, by his natal city a Greco-Roman. He 
had two mother-tongues ; although doubtless he may 
have preferred for a long time the Hebrew to the 
Greek, and was able to preach upon the Areopagus at 
Athens, without drawing upon himself too contemptu- 
ous criticisin On the part of the purists of the Agora. 
The classical literature of the Greek w^orld was not 
unknown to him ; he quotes, when it seems good to 
him, Aratus his compatriot, Epimenides the Cretan, or 
a comedy of Menander. It has been observed that the 
passages of these poets which he recalls are of a some- 
what proverbial character ; but a man who, under 
grave circumstances, is hurried in writing or speaking, 
is not likely to stop to cite anything else. However, 
we do not claim that Saul the Pharisee was as familiar 
with the Greek poets or sages as with the prophets of 
Israel. Sometimes, as at Athens, he repressed in his 
great soul the fierce passions of the Jew, which were 
excited by the hateful spectacle of idolatry, and con- 
nected his Christian preaching with the inner necessi- 
ties of religion, wdiich cause all consciences to sigh 
after '' the unknown God." Sometimes also in his 
Epistles he restrains with efibrt the violence of his 
feelings ; but most frequently he gives them free 
course. This soul of iron bears in itself an exhaust- 
less source of ardent exhortations, touching entreaties. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. II5 

tender reproaches, or overwhelming invectives. Argu- 
ments come to his lips with so great abundance and 
vehemence as often to render his thought obscure. 
He is too impetuous and too full of ideas to give time 
always for finishing his thought and following it to the 
end ; he allow^s himself to be turned aside b}^ other 
suggestions, and sometimes stops or wanders in the 
midst of a phrase which he forgets to finish. He has 
been very justly compared to an inundating torrent : 
his figures are strongly colored, his reasonings impas- 
sioned : touches of sentiment, vivacities of lan^uagfe, 
press, accumulate, interrupt each other with strange 
rapidity and vigor. What makes him still more diffi- 
cult to follow is, that, having been reared in the corrupt 
dialect of the rabbins, he prolongs, complicates, re- 
fines his metaphors and his proofs ; he turns them 
over in every sense, and grafts one upon another. He 
is never afraid to give lively imagery for argument. 
Sometimes it is impossible to agree with his opinion ; 
less, however, as regards the substance of his idea 
than the logical value of his argumentation, so complex 
and capricious does rabbinical subtilty become with 
him, so singular is the use that he makes of the analo- 
gies which he wishes to establish, of the texts upon 
which he comments with extreme freedom, of the 
histories and personages even of the Old Testament. 
In order to comprehend his thought w^ithout exagger- 



Il6 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

ating It, we must, in such cases, remember that to give 
an entirely new signification to a passage of the Jew- 
ish Bible was a favorite exercise of the mind among the 
Jews ; and this was by no means considered a violation 
of the profound respect due to the text, which, besides 
all the imaginary and ingenious meanings sought in it, 
and received with more or less credit, still preserved 
its primitive sense. Without a knowledge of the 
manner of teaching and of discussing peculiar to the 
doctors of the law, it is impossible to understand St. 
Paul. This great man could, indeed, cease to be a 
Pharisee, but not to be a rabbin ; a religion may be 
abjured, but never the education which has been re- 
ceived, and the direction which has thereby been 
given to the mind. 

II. 

Exuberance of thought and feeling, impatience of 
every external rule, are characteristics of the style of 
St. Paul. These enter into his character, and are the 
explanation of his life. Emancipated from Pharisa- 
ism and the yoke of the law in which he had been 
nurtured, his vigorous mind had a horror of the 
chains in which he had lived ; and in the bosom of 
Christian freedom he unfolded the independence of his 
thought, the boldness of his nature, and his wonderful 
power of action. His only desire was to extend to the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



117 



whole human race the truth and the liberty which he 
enjoyed with such keen delight. In this immense 
labor he was wholly spent, and the adherence of mul- 
titudes proved that he had chosen his mission wisely. 
Thus, when he saw his work of conversion, so fruitful, 
so regenerative, so ardently desired, hindered by the 
servility of some and the timidity of others, he was 
seized with mingled emotions of indignation, pity, 
anger, and tenderness. He defended those souls 
which he had won to Christ against enthralment to 
Mosaism with the tragic intrepidity and heroic love 
of a mother against the kidnappers who would reduce 
her children to slavery. 

Paul was a reformer in a far wider sense than 
Stephen : second in time, he will probably remain the 
grandest of all the reformers. It is to him that Christian- 
ity owes its universality, which had been formally 
taught and proclaimed by Jesus, but was afterwards 
gravely compromised by Judaizing Christians. As for 
the Israelites of Palestine, they considered that to break 
with Jewish traditions would be an act of too frightful 
audacity. They did not know how to free themselves 
from the thousand legal, sacerdotal, and hygienic 
prescriptions in which the law entwined, at every 
moment, the life of each Israelite. So far from 
renouncing these themselves, they sought to impose 
them upon all Gentiles who entered the church ; they 



Il8 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

did not comprehend that these observances were im- 
possible outside of their own country and chmate, nor 
that they w^ere odious and unacceptable to the rest of 
the world. For an Epictetus or a Marcus Aurelius 
to submit to the laws of the Jews would have been a 
retrogression ; it would have been to cramp the mind, 
and to abdicate moral freedom. Paul understood 
this, and he refused to impose upon humanity this 
heavy and galling yoke. He cast aside all the cus- 
toms which would have rendered his work impossible, 
or compromised it in any way. He forbade his 
disciples to trouble themselves about the Mosaic 
regulations by which certain kinds of food — pork, 
for instance — were prohibited; he did not permit 
them, for conscience' sake, to inquire as to what was 
sold at the shambles ; and he exclaimed with proud 
disdain that " the ki7tgdom of God is not meat and 
drink^ but righteous7zess and j[)eace^ and joy in 
the Holy Ghost T"^ 

Unfortunately the Judeo-Christians resisted this 
teaching, wdiich appeared to them subversive, if not 
impious. Besides the fact that the Jewish world, 
through pride and habit, clung to the law, and did not 
comprehend its defects, it did not share the indefatiga- 
ble love of St. Paul for the Gentile world. The 
Judaizing church would have greatly preferred to 

* Rom. xiv. 17. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. II9 

await at Jerusalem the idolaters who wished to be 
converted, than to traverse the world in order, as 
Paul said in his impassioned language, to draw souls 
captive to the obedience of the cross. However, 
moved by a spirit of emulation, this party also had its 
missionaries. James sent them even to the churches 
which Paul had founded, and these emissaries of 
Judaizing Christianity exerted themselves to repair 
the evil which they thought Paul had done by his 
excessive boldness ; they preached the observance of 
the works of the law, and succeeded in imposing 
them upon some persons. This is what happened in 
Galatia, a province peopled formerly by Gauls, where 
the very vivacious spirit of the inhabitants was in- 
clined to a versatile frivolity, too much resembling that 
of modern France. Paul, wounded by the relapse of 
his disciples, wrote them his magnificent Epistle to the 
Galatians. This Epistle is animated by so grand a 
breathing of liberal spirituality, it is so rich in color- 
ing and so varied in movement, so tender and so be- 
seeching, that it will forever remain the ardent and 
glorious proclamation of Christian liberty. It is here 
that he cries out with so much indignation and 
authority, " Stand fast therefore in the liberty 
wherewith Christ hath made you free^ and he not 
entangled again in the yoke of bondage J^ * 

* Gal. V. I. 



I20 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSIFORMATIONS 

After Jesus, Paul is the greatest and most formidable 
champion of the spirit against the letter, and of the 
freedom of the soul against human authority. On this 
point he comprehended the Master better than any one 
else. It is he who wrote those imperishable words 
which a French and Protestant queen once made her 
device and the epigraph of a political constitution 
which to-day, at the end of three centuries, would still 
be regarded as too liberal : " Where the spirit of the 
Lord is^ there is liberty T * 

The conduct of St. James, or of his envoys, was 
certainly as conscientious as it was void of intelligence 
and of fraternal love. Paul declares that, instead of 
going to struggle against his colleagues, he preached 
Christ only in the places where others were not 
preaching him.f The orthodox of every kind have 
often tried to palliate the dissension between James 
and Paul. It is sufficient, however, to read their 
Epistles in order to recognize how grave and deep this 
dissension was. 9 

The one teaches exactly the contrary of what the 
other says ; and they take care, in order the better to 
refute each other, to choose in the vast field of biblical 
history, the same examples, while giving them op- 
posite meanings. 

* Jeanne d'Albret. — 2 Cor. iii. 17. 
t Rom. XV. 20. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 121 

Paul is not willing to attribute, as the law did, to 
external acts, ceremonies, fasts, ablutions, or even to 
prayers and alms, a real and material w^orth outside of 
the feelings which inspired them. For him it is faith, 
the religious and moral sentiment raised to a high 
degree of power, that saves and sanctifies. One may 
do religious acts without being religious ; w^orks of the 
law are nothing. " Thei^efore vje conchtde^^ says he, 
" tJiat a 77ian is justified by faith withoict the deeds 
of the lawy Whereupon he cites an example in 
Abraham, and this verse of Genesis : '-'- Abraha7n be- 
lieved God^ and it was accounted to him for right- 
eousness J^ * James says precisely the contrary. He 
derides him who would lay claim to the grace of 
charity by urging the poor to be w^armed and filled, 
wdthout, however, doing anything to warm and fill 
them. ^' Even so faith^^ says he, " // it hath not 
works^ is dead^ bei?ig alone, Tea^ a f}ia7i may say^ 
Thou hast faith ^ and I have %vorks : show me thy 
faith without thy works^ and I will show thee 7ny 
faith by my works. Thou believest that there is 07ie 
God; thou doest well: the devils also believe^ a7id 
tre7nble. But wilt thou know^ O vain ma7z^ that 
faith without works is dead ? Was 7iot Abrahain 
our father justified by works when he had ofi^ered 
Isaac his so7i upo7i the altar? Seest thou how faith 

* Rom. ill. 27; iv. 3, 32. Gal. iii. 6. 



122 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

wrought with his works ^ and by works was faith 
?nade perfect? And the scripture was fulfilled 
which saith^ Abraham believed God^ and it was iTn- 
puted unto hi7n for righteousness : and he was called 
the friend of God. Te see the7t how that by works 
a man is justified^ and not by faith only,^' * 

It requires strong prepossessions not to recognize 
that James is here refuting Paul ; that he turns against 
him the very example which he has cited, and arrives 
at a directly opposite conclusion. 

Doubtless it can be said of the two adversaries that 
they were both right ; that works done without heart 
and without faith are null, and that faith which exerts 
no influence upon our acts is dead. It may even be 
claimed, that from a certain high point of view the 
two theories harmonize and blend. But the orthodox, 
whether Catholic or Protestant, close their eyes to the 
light when they still dare to speak of orthodoxy and 
uniformity in the face of such facts. 

It is incontestable that, during the life of the apostles, 

the church was divided, not in respect to secondary 

questions, but on the vital question of the age : it is 

incontestable that James was disturbed and hurt by the 

liberalism of Paul, that he sent emissaries to do over 

again his work in the churches, and that he expressly 

refuted his positions in a letter addressed to all 

Christians. 

* James ii. 17-24. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I 23 

What was St. Peter doing all this while? the Cath- 
olics will ask. Was it not for him, prince of the 
apostles and pope, to reestablish order among the 
chiefs of the church? Here are the facts: Peter was 
in no respect superior to his colleagues, and had no 
kind of jurisdiction over them. In the question undei 
consideration his reason was in favor of Paul, w^hile 
his feebleness of character leaned towards James. He 
allowed Mosaic obligations to be imposed upon his 
owm disciples, and through complacency submitted to 
them himself. Paul was then at Antioch, where 
Peter soon arrived ; Paul was a witness of what was 
taking place, and became indignant ; he did not treat 
his colleague very gently ; he accused him openly of 
dissimulation, and of not walking uprightly. It is he 
himself who relates it. ^''But when Peter was come 
to Antioch^ I withstood him to the face^ because he 
was to be blamed. For before that certain came 
from yames^ he did eat with the Gottiles ; but when 
they were come^ he withdrew and separated himself 
fea7'i7ig them which were of the circumcisio7i [the 
Judaizing Christians]. A7zd the other jfews dissem- 
bled likewise with hi7n ; i7zso77iuch that Barnabas 
also was carried away with their dissimulatio7t. 
But whe7i I saw that they walked 7tot uprightly 
accordi7tg to the truths of the gospel^ I said u7ito 
Peter before them all^ If thou^ being a yew^ livest 



124 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

after the manner of the Gentiles^ and not as do the 
Jews^ why co77ipellest thoit the Gentiles to live as do 
the Jews?'"'' 

On this memorable occasion Peter is the representa- 
tive of those men of compromise, who, for the sake of 
peace, make concessions contrary to the truth and to 
their consciences, and who deserve to be energetically 
rebuked by men of principle. 

If, now, we are asked, Where, at this epoch, was the 
unity of faith called Orthodoxy? we shall reply that it 
was neither in parties nor in men, however great and 
holy they might be, but in the resultant of diverse 
tendencies, in the totality. Paul was fundamentally in 
the truth, although his thought might be to such a 
degree exaggerated and paradoxical as to chafe the 
narrow and practical spirit of James. The latter did 
not comprehend the loftiness of Paul's ideas ; he did 
not recognize in him the universal truth in revolt 
against the prejudices of a petty people. Peter under- 
stood this better, but feared to displease ; and with 
him, as so often happens with men of expediency, it 
was not intelligence, but moral courage, that was want- 
ing. He had nothing to reply when Paul, with his 
stern logic and impetuous enthusiasm, exclaimed, 
''''If I build again the thiitgs which I destroyed^ I 
make myself a transgressor T f It is what men of 

* Gal. ii. 11-^14. t Gal. ii. 18. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 25 

half aims and feeble courage generally do — rebuild 
with one hand what they have thrown down with the 
other. 

What spectacle is more noble and instructive than 
that of these first and great propagators of the gospel, 
contending one against the other, each for his princi- 
ple? But one feels disposed to ask how it is that the 
multitudes who have in their hands the book in which 
these striking differences, these solemn conflicts, are 
recounted, can still be taken in the snare of the unity 
of doctrines. Orthodoxy is nothing — has never been 
anything. All that there is real in it is a retrograde 
tendency, of which Peter, bound still by the chains of 
Judaism, which he had attempted to throw off, is an 
exact type. But orthodoxy, so far as it implies a rule 
of faith, of exclusive doctrine, preached by apostles, 
and professed by Christians, is only a legal fiction, an 
historical falsehood. True Christian unity has never 
consisted in anything but the imitation of Jesus Christ, 
and in his imperishable principles of love, pardon, and 
perfectness. 

III. 

It is impossible to comprehend in St. Paul either 
the man or his work, unless his doctrine be taken into 
the account ; but the converse is not less true : his doc- 
trine is explicable only through his character, and 
especially through the struggle in which his whole life 



126 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

was engaged. Chronologically, he was the first of the 
great theologians ; and his system has exerted a pow- 
erful influence on nearly all the others of the church. 
His Epistles are the oldest monument of the religion of 
Christ, and the most antique part of the New Testa- 
ment. The Gospels were afterwards added to it. 
But it has been rightly said that if the Gospels had 
never been written, all their essential elements would 
be found in the Epistles of Paul. Among the Gospel 
narratives which concern Jesus personally, there are 
two only of which Paul seems to have had no knowl- 
edge — the miraculous conception, of which there is no 
trace either in the Epistles of Paul, or in the Gospel 
and Epistles of John ; and the ascension, of which 
Paul never speaks. When he enumerates, as proofs 
of the resurrection of Christ, the diverse circumstances 
under which the Savior showed himself after his death, 
Paul places his own vision on the road to Damascus 
in the same rank with all the other apparitions of the 
risen Christ ; he seems to forget, or, rather, to ignore, 
that, according to the Gospel history, Jesus had re- 
turned into heaven during the interval between this 
apparition and the preceding. 

Besides, if Paul became a theologian, it was not from 
simple curiosity concerning the problems of religious 
speculation ; it was from a wholly different motive, 
which had always been the ruling principle of his life. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 27 

He aspired with his whole soul after holiness, or, to use 
the Jewish term, righteousness. A Pharisee, he had 
wished to become a just man through exact observance 
of the law, and of the works which it prescribed ; he 
had carried Israelitic zeal even to fanaticism and perse- 
cution. Nevertheless, like the Jews, and many Gentiles 
of his time, he felt himself a sinner ; sin in his nature 
struggled against the law, and the law was powerless 
to conquer, in spite of the ardent desire for holiness 
with which the future apostle was inspired. When he 
became a Christian he renounced Moses and Pharisa- 
ism at once and forever, the law, the works imposed 
and regulated by it, and placed his reliance on faith 
in Christ, on the inner life, and on the Spirit. God 
wishes to save men through Christ ; this is the good 
news. Christ is the Redeemer ; that is to say, the De- 
liverer, who frees souls from the twofold slavery of sin 
and of the law, and who sanctifies them by his spirit. 
The spirit of Christ creates in us what neither the law 
of Moses nor any other law could create — the Chris- 
tian life : ''''Henceforth it is 7tot I that live^^ exclaims 
St. Paul, ''''but Christ liveth in 7ne,^^ 

The whole theology of Paul rests not only upon the 
antagonism of Christianity, which he calls faith, with 
Mosaism, which he calls law, but upon the more radi- 
cal opposition of the Jewish principle to the Christian 
principle, of exterior and formalistic legality to the 



128 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

interior life of tlie spirit. All ceremonial religions, all 
external rules, all rituals, all codes, are powerless to 
sanctify, because they bear upon the outer life of the 
human being. It is by the spirit alone, by the heart, 
the conscience, the real feelings, the inner life, that 
man becomes holy and just, because it is by these 
alone that man subjects to the influence of truth and 
love the root of all his faculties, the source whence all 
his actions spring. 

Faith, according to Paul, does not reduce itself 
merely to the fact that one does not doubt such or 
such a doctrine ; it is the adhesion of the entire soul, 
convinced, penetrated, regenerated, embracing, with 
all its strength, truth, Christ, God. This is the faith 
which alone justifies, the faith by which the just man 
lives. 

If Paul be inquired of as to how Jesus saves souls, 
there are two responses, which he gives by turn, and 
wdiich he sometimes confounds. In truth, he enter- 
tained two theories of salvation, one mystic and emo- 
tional, the other dogmatic and argumentative. He 
often gives one alone of these as sufficient ; and two 
inverse series of passages might be arranged, wherein 
each would seem to be all, while the other is passed 
over in silence. The mystical theory is that of the 
union of the believer with him in whom he believes. 
Christ is wholly united to God ; and he who believes 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 29 

in God through Christ is united closely to Christ, and 
through Christ to God. This idea, which is found 
again in St. John, and which emanates directly from 
Christ himself, is carried very far by our apostle. The 
Christian is to live the life of his Master, to die and 
rise again; that is, associate himself with the crises 
which he has passed through, and come forth from 
them triumphant. Christ, by his death and resurrec- 
tion, found and showed himself superior to the world, 
to sin, and to death itself; this superiority, this victory 
over ourselves and men, this contempt of death, we 
are to share with him. Being thus united to him by 
love and faith, we shall triumph, we shall reign eter- 
nally w^th him, and nothing in the world, or in heaven, 
or in hell, " shall be able to separate us from the love 
of God^ which is in Christ jfesus our Lord.^^ 

The second theory is not in contradiction with this 
first : but the one has no need of the other ; each is 
sufficient. Before describing the latter, it is necessary 
to fix the idea which Paul had formed of the person 
of the Savior. He borrows from Jewish thought the 
notion of a Messiah, a living and personal manifesta- 
tion of God. This Messiah he recognizes in Jesus. 
In his principal and most dogmatic Epistles, univer- 
sally admitted as authentic, he insists very little upon 
the divine grandeur of Christ. In others he lays much 
more stress upon this dogma : not only does he call 

9 



130 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

the Savior " the image of the htvisible God^'^ * but 
he declares that " in hiin dwelleth all the fulness of 
the Godhead bodily.^' f He even goes so far as to de- 
clare " by hijn all things co7tsistJ' \ 

This is not to say, however, that Paul w^as orthodox 
as to the divinity of Jesus Christ, and that he taught 
the Trinitarian dogma. § Neither the idea nor the 
vs^ord had yet been invented ; they only came into ex- 
istence much later. At that time no one thought of 
making the Holy Spirit a distinct person. No one 
had any notion of that equality betw^een the persons 
which is absolutely essential to the doctrine of the 
Trinity. II St. Paul taught everywhere the inferiority 

* Col. i. 15. t Col. ii. 9. % Col. i. 17. 

§ Perhaps it will be thought that in making mention here 
of a dogma like the Trinity, before having arrived at the epoch 
when it began to be believed, we are not pursuing a sufficient- 
ly logical method. But we are forced to this plan from the 
difficulty of making ourselves well understood. The thoughts 
and words which we try to recognize in Paul just as he con- 
ceived and employed them, have come down to us changed 
and distorted by false significations given to them by the theo- 
logians and the churches. In order to return to the primitive 
sense, it is indispensable to explain wherein he differed from 
subsequent interpretations. 

II Here is the official formula derived from the symbol of St. 
Athanasius, generally admitted by the Catholic Church, the 
Greco-Russian Church, the Anglican Church, and, in a word, 
by all the churches called Orthodox : "In this Trinity there is 
neither anterior nor posterior, neither greater nor less ; but 
these three persons are entirely co-eternal, and perfectly equal." 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



131 



of the Son to the Father. In the very place where he 
speaks of him as the Creator, he calls him " the first- 
bor7t of eveiy creatMreT * 

Between the two Divine Persons recognized by him, 
he rigorously maintains the subordination of the second 
to the first. According to him, there is of God only 
God ; he expresses himself in this respect with a scru- 
pulous precision : when he describes, in terms of in- 
comparable grandeur, the eternal future, where God 
shall be all in all, when he announces that all things 
shall be subjected to the Son by the Father, he does 
not fail to observe that the Father Himself is excepted, 
and that the Son shall be subject unto Him.f One 
feels in every line of the Epistles that Paul raises the 
Son as high and as near to God as possible, but one 
feels at the same time that his deep monotheistic 
conviction always constrains him to declare the con- 
stant superiority of the one God. Wise reservation, 
true and necessary conviction, which the major- 
ity of Christian churches have not known how to 
preserve ! 

God has resolved in His mercy and by His grace to 
save man from sin through His Son Jesus Christ. 

As soon as one no longe-r believes in this absolute equality of 
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, one is no longer 
orthodox or Christian, according to the symbol which we have 
just cited, and one will infallibly be damned to all eternity. 
* Col. i. 15. t I Cor. XV. 27, 28. 



132 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Those who believe In him Jesus saves, or, according 
to the primary sense of the word, heals, by his life, 
which was exempt from sin ; by his death, which was 
voluntary, and not, like that of sinners, deserved ; and 
especially by his glorious resurrection. Jesus, by an 
act of his will, substitutes the death which he freely 
endured, for the condemnation or spiritual death which 
sinners ought to sufler. By their faith, by their ad- 
herence to this substitution, they enter into possession 
of the new life, which is that of the risen Christ. God, 
on His part, accepts and ratifies this twofold substitu- 
tion of the death of Jesus for our spiritual death, and 
of his spiritual life for ours. 

The Father approves this substitution so much the 
more because He has Himself prepared it ; He then 
pardons the renewed man the sins of which he was 
guilty before believing in Christ. From this moment, 
man, spiritually risen with Christ, lives with his Re- 
deemer ; or, rather, it is Christ who lives in him. 

This doctrine of the apostle served as a basis to an 
entirely different dogmatic edifice, which St. Anselm 
of Canterbury erected a thousand years afterwards. 
Its mystic element disappears, the adherence of the 
heart is neglected, the moral and religious union of the 
believer with Jesus is no longer essential. A purely 
juridical element is substituted : God is no longer able 
to pardon sinners unless some one has endured their 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 33 

penalties. Now, sin being an infinite offence against 
the Infinite Being, the reparation and the reparator 
must themselves be infinite. This is why the Second 
Person of the Trinity becomes man, and, after having 
lived upon the earth, obeying in our stead all the com- 
mandments of God, dies on the cross, enduring an 
amount of suffering equal to what all the elect together 
would have endured through all eternity. Among 
other essential differences between the two systems, it 
has been rightly observed that, according to Anselm, 
man is the object of a contract between the Father and 
the Son, whilst, according to Paul, man himself is one 
of the contracting parties ; in fine, what is of the first 
importance in the opinion of Paul, is the mystic inter- 
change of two deaths, and especially of two lives, in 
order that the Christian may live in the communion 
of the Master. 

Unhappily, the faith which thus regenerates the sin- 
ner is not granted to all ; this inevitable inequality, 
together with the predominant object of St. Paul's 
labors, and the character of the polemics of his time, 
led him to adopt the doctrine of election and predes- 
tination — a cruel doctrine, which Calvin has ren- 
dered still more cruel. Here it is, as Paul conceived 
of it, in opposition to the proud pretensions of the 
Jews. Israel was persuaded that in consequence of a 
contract of alliance, formally concluded between Jeho- 



134 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

vah their God, and Abraham their ancestor, they had 
a monopoly of true religion and of salvation, under the 
condition of obeying the prescriptions of the law. An 
Israelite who considered himself blameless as regards 
the keeping of the law, despised all strangers, how- 
ever great might be their moral worth, or however ex- 
alted their faith. God Himself did not seem to them 
free to lift such a man to their own height. Paul, 
irritated by such injustice and ill-founded pride, was 
vexed to see the will of the Omnipotent thus restricted ; 
and, throwing himself from one extreme to its oppo- 
site, he affirmed that the legal contract upon which 
the Jews relied was henceforth worthless, and he made 
the salvation of each soul depend upon the good pleas- 
ure of God. He reminded the Jews that Abraham 
himself was as yet uncircumcised when God chose him 
for His mandatary. God Himself has elected from all 
eternity those whom He saves, long before they could 
have observed the law ; before, even, the existence of 
that law ; before the calling of the Hebrew race. God 
has, then, the right to call to Himself and to save Gen- 
tiles as well as Jews. Thus one can recognize, even 
in the abstruse depths of PauFs dogmas, the prevail- 
ing motive of his whole life — the idea of the conver- 
sion of the Gentiles. In other words, Paul, in default, 
perhaps, of a reason more accessible to his auditors, 
laid stress on the absolute right of the Creator, his 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I35 

eternal arbitrariness, against a pretended privilege of 
divine right. In short, he does not claim that God 
has excepted such and such persons from the condem- 
nation deserved by all, because these were one day to 
merit His preference. He maintains, on the contrary, 
that the sole motive of God's choice is His will. This, 
we are not afraid to say, is a deplorable doctrine ; it 
could come only from that enslaved Orient where the 
will of a master is accepted as good, whatever it may 
be. From the idea of God's omnipotence and absolute 
independence. His exemption from the obligations 
of justice was naturally inferred. In the presence of 
sovereign force, it was not admitted that there could be 
any question of right ; the workman being the master, 
to create what he wishes, the clay cannot call the 
potter to an account for having fashioned it according 
to his will, whether into a vessel the most vile or the 
most precious. Paul is not at all astonished that 
" God^ willing' to show his wrath ^ and to make his 
power known ^^' created '' vessels of wrath fitted to 
destruction'^ All that the apostle admires is the 
" much long-sufiFerijig'^ with which God endures these 
beings predestined by Himself to misfortune and evil.* 
Let us not be scandalized beyond measure at an 
opinion so shocking to our conscience ; this opinion 
itself was then a considerable progress. A Pharisee 

* Rom. ix. 22. 



136 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

was persuaded, from his childhood, that of all the 
human race, only Israelites faithful to the law could 
be savxd, that is, admitted by God to the banquet of 
honor eternally presided over by Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob. This same Pharisee had a great step to make 
in advance, in the sense of charity and spirituality, 
in order to allow that God would remain free to admit 
to this supreme glory impure Gentiles, despised and 
abhorred Samaritans. This same dogma, which galls 
us as stained with a revolting partiality, seemed to 
half-emancipated Jews an excess of impartiality hard 
to be accepted. 

Paul, proclaiming the divine arbitrariness on the 
ruins of the Israel itic monopoly, reminds us of the 
communes of the middle ages, which thought to have 
gained everything when they were able to substitute 
for the burdensome privileges of their feudal lords 
the absolute power of one remote king. It became 
evident, with time, that arbitrariness is neither good 
nor just anywhere : in politics, because it is contrary 
to the rights of all ; in religion, because it wounds at 
once the conscience of man and the holiness of God. 

Let us not forget, also, that this same apostle, whose 
dogmatics appear to us hard and unjust, wrote the in- 
comparable eulogy of charity.* Let any one read 
this immortal page, and he will recognize how large a 

* I Con xiii. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 37 

place Christian love held in a heart so warm and a 
thought so high. Notwithstanding the obscurities of 
his dogmatics, it will be comprehended how a multi- 
tude of souls, famishing for truth and virtue, were 
won to Christ through the glowing words of this man 
of poor bodily presence, but of whom the mind was 
so richly endowed, the heart inflamed with enthu- 
siasm and love, and the life ennobled by a long series 
of heroic sacrifices. This combination of eminent 
gifts was none too great for the task of sowing with 
young churches Syria, all Asia Minor, Athens and 
Greece, Rome and Italy. It has fallen to very few 
men to effect a moral revolution, so deep and durable, 
in so considerable a portion of humanity. Paul re- 
mains one of the giants of history ; he will always be 
one of the most brilliant torches of Christianity, even 
for those who think they have the right to reject some 
of his dogmas, and who have learned from him to 
hear as wise men, and to judge what he says to 
them.* 

By the dominant idea of his whole life, by the 
authority and splendor with which he vindicated the 
rights of the Christian conscience, by his incessant 
revolt against the tyranny of the letter, and against 
every domination over souls, he has remained the 
reformei' par excellence. It is in his school that all 

* I Cor. X. 15. 



138 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

those are formed, who, from age to age, protest, in the 
name of God and of the gospel, against the yoke of 
the churches, or of priests. After his Master, it is he 
who inspired a John Huss, a Savonarola, a Wickliffe, 
a Faber Stapulensis, a Luther, a Calvin, and a 
Zwingle. 

Every time that the world and the church are ripe 
for a great revolution, it is the word of Paul which 
resounds anew in men's souls, and gives the signal. 
It may be said of him that for eighteen centuries he 
has sounded the tocsin of all insurrections of the 
Christian spirit against the usui'pations of the law and 
of the letter, of rites and of the clergy. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I39 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE CHRISTIANITY OF ST. PETER. 

**To run after the chimera of uniformitj^ in religious beliefs 
is always an enterprise full of dangers, of which the result 
cannot fail to be at first trouble, then slavery of thought, 
finally disgust and death. This is the error of Catholicism." 
— Samuel Vincent, Du Protestajiisfne, p. 255. 



X 



I. 

HE human mind never remains immobile, but it 



X does not know how to move long in a straight 
line. It seldom advances without deviating a little to 
the right or to the left. Often, when it has made 
some steps in advance, it recoils ; either because its 
strength is exhausted, or because it begins to be fright- 
ened at its progress and the direction that it has taken. 
But it no more follows the direct line backward than 
forward ; it never returns to the point whence it 
started ; it does not lose all that it had gained, and it 
still deviates even in obeying a retrograde impulse. 

If one should draw upon the horizon a line destined 
to describe the development of human thought, this 



140 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

line would not ascend vertically, but would be found 
more or less oblique ; it would not be straight, but bro- 
ken here and there by deep angles ; yet the summit of 
the angles directed upwards would always rise farther 
than that of the reentering angles would sink. Thus, 
as the sea rises, each of the waves encroaches upon the 
shore, crowds before it the preceding wave which is 
retiring, and passes beyond the extreme point that the 
flood has marked with its foam. 

In like manner the Christian religion, being subject 
to the general laws of our mind, has not ceased to be 
transformed with it ; after a large and strong flight it 
soon degenerates, but it then renews its vigor at its 
source, reacts by virtue of its constituent principles, 
and finally passes beyond the highest point which it 
had reached. 

To compare small with great, there resulted from 
the doctrine of Paul what had already resulted from 
that of his Master. The teaching of Jesus, too pure 
and too liberal for his time, had been reduced by his 
followers to the narrow horizon of Judaical Chris- 
tianity : heavy and inevitable fall ! The theology of 
Paul, too bold, too contemptuous of the prerogatives 
of Israel, too impartial as to Jews and Gentiles, was 
abandoned. It would be easy to give many proofs 
of this, and to cite, for example, apocryphal works 
written against Paul. One of the most curious facts 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I4I 

is the silence of certain theologians ; thus Justin the 
Martyr, in his voluminous writings, always affects to 
ignore Paul — never mentions nor quotes him. It is 
true, however, that Justin, although an ancient philos- 
opher, was born in Palestine, that is to say, was Judeo- 
Christian by birth. 

The contest between Judaizing Christianity and the 
humanitarian Christianity of Paul was as long in dura- 
tion as it was ardent in character. 

Both were conquered, but in very different degrees. 
Neither Paul nor James carried the day ; the victory 
belonged to the medium illogical tendency of which 
St. Peter was the organ. The secret of his thought's 
success was, that he thought very little ; he endeavored 
to favor the Judaists who ruled him, without deciding 
against Paul, whose views he shared, although timidly. 
A smaller scope of mind and a feeble character — such 
were the advantages of Peter over Paul ; and they 
sufficed to give success to his cause. Mediocre men 
have their days of triumph, in w^hich the world is 
grateful to them for not being superior to it. 

II. 

Whilst Paul and Barnabas were preaching at An- 
tioch, extreme Judaists, who came from Jerusalem, 
troubled their apostleship by saying to their prose- 
lytesj ^''Except ye be circumcised after the manner 



142 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

of MoscSs \'c cajniot he savaf.'' * On this question 
there arose a great dispute, whieh became a quarrel, 
and concerning which no agreement could be arrived 
at. Paul, Barnabas, and certain others, were then 
deputized to go to Jerusalem, in order to consult the 
apostles, and the elders or pastors, about this veiy 
grave matter ; for to impose circumcision upon the 
Christians would have sutiiced to close the church to 
three fourths of the pagan world. The apostles and 
pastors were assembled at Jerusalem. Peter and 
James conducted the discussion in this conference, 
which has been adorned with the pretentious ' and ^^ 
historically-premature title oi council, under the name j 
o{ the fn'st c\?cumenic council ot J^'i'usalem. This 
reunion imposed neither circimicision nor the law of 
!Moses upon the Christians who had come out from 
paganism ; but, at tlie instigation of James, it was 
recommended to them to obey certain precepts which 
were claimed to date from Xoah. and in which are 
found mingled, strangely enough, two ancient Hebrew 
superstitions with a counsel of simple propriety, and 
a precept of the most elementary morality. By a 
letter, written In the name of the apostles, pastors, 
and the whole church, and which appealed to the 
IIolv Ghost, it was enjoined upon tlie new Christians 
to abstain from meats ottered to idols, from the blood 

* Acts XV. I. 



i 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 43 

of animals, and from the flesh of things strangled, 
and, finally, to keep themselves from fornication. 
This last feature is probably an allusion to certain 
idolatrous forms of worship, in which moral disorder 
was carried to its height. The precept which con- 
cerned the victims sacrificed to false gods might serve 
to prevent lamentable confusions ; by failing to observe 
it the Christians would have seemed, perhaps, to par- 
ticipate in acts of paganism. The other commands 
had no value. This was by no means that wide 
Christian liberty which Paul preached ; he submitted, 
however, to this minimum of Jewish legality. But 
these precepts suffered the usual fate of compromises : 
no one was content with them, the command was not 
executed, and the debate did not cease. In this re- 
spect the first council resembled many others. 

Evidently all three, Peter, James, and Paul, acted 
with excellent intentions ; all three made concessions 
to harmony and peace. What would have been the re- 
sult if in this assembly, as in so many others, each had 
been inflexible against contrary opinions — if James 
had exacted of the new converts circumcision, which 
Paul, as in duty bound, would have rejected? 

In reality, however, the result of this assembly, 
which was perhaps as great as could have been ex- 
pected, lowered the moral plane of Christianity. 
Jesus had said, ^''Not that which goeth into the 



144 



FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



mouth dejileth a man; but that which cometh out of 
the 77iouth^ this dejileth a ?nan;^^^ that is to say, 
evil, lying, or impure words. Paul wished that the 
conscience should not be disquieted by rules about 
eating and drinking. But here are the apostles as- 
sembled, with the pastors, interdicting certain kinds 
of food in the name of the Holy Ghost ! To such a 
degree do the purest theories bend in practice ! If 
the peace of the church was partially reestablished 
for the moment, the spirituality and liberty of primi- 
tive Christianity received a blow of which the effects 
have not yet ceased. 

III. 

The opinion which prevailed in the church was not 
the too strictly Judaizing Christianity of James, and 
still less the pure spiritualism of Paul ; it was the 
doctrine of Peter, Pauline to a certain point, but mak- 
ing too easily grave concessions to Mosaism. An 
extremely strange type of this intermediary Chris- 
tianity, of this real compromise, is the Epistle of St. 
Peter.*)* The apostle is evidently doing therein a work 



* Matt. XV. 2. 

t We recognize only one of the Epistles as authentic — the 
first of the two which bear this name in the New Testament; 
no person who is at all versed in biblical criticism admits the 
second, which belongs to a much later period than the life of 
Peter. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I45 

of conciliation, and, in this short letter, at least fifteen 
passages have been counted in which he cites with 
honor the words of Paul, and four in which he bor- 
rows, with equal show of respect, from James.* 

It was to this apostle that the church of Rome 
afterwards attached itself, precisely because his less 
peremptory opinion, his conciliatory disposition, suited 
the Roman temperament. Decisive and absolute 
geniuses, like St. Paul and St. Augustine, have never 
held more than the semblance of authority at Rome ; 
a high degree of deference is shown to them ; but the 
church puts them aside in order to follow a more pru- 
dent middle course. This is one of the secrets of the 
art of governing. It is because Peter represents the 
compromise of the two tendencies between w^iich the 
Apostolic Church was divided, that Rome adopted 
him as its head. Adopt is the correct w^ord. For 
Paul was really the Apostle of the Romans ; after 
having written to them the most dogmatic of his 
Epistles, he established himself among them, and 
labored and died in their church. But he suffered 
more than mere persecution. He whom the Jews of 
Jerusalem treated as an apostate, and whom forty of 
them had sworn to assassinate,! he who was feared 
and hated as much as he was admired and loved, 

* Reuss, Hist, de la Theol. Ckret, au Sihcle Apost, II. 293. 
t Acts xxiii. 13. 

10 



146 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

found himself isolated at Rome, and abandoned in the 
midst of prejudiced Christians.* At the end of two 
years of sojourn he still complained of this treat- 
ment.! 

Peter was not martyred at Rome, like Paul ; he was 
never pastor or bishop there : there is every reason to 
believe that he never saw the capital of the Roman 
world. Nevertheless, his cause was so fervently 
espoused by the church of that city, that it has never 
since consented to believe that he was not its founder, 
its bishop, and martyred within its walls ; all these 
being things which accommodating legend finally sup- 
poses and relates in spite of history. St. Paul, from 
the first, held the highest rank in the Christian church ; 
St. Peter was added to him. Everywhere at Rome, 
even upon the chief altar of the Basilica of St. Peter, 
even upon the official seal of the popes, and in the 
legends most dear to the Eternal City, the two apostles 
are associated together ; but in this singular city, where 
everything is for show, where etiquette invades every- 
thing, and remains immovable whilst important mat- 
ters are undergoing transformation, a custom, puerile, 
yet unchangeable and very ancient, still recalls times 
far different from ours. Not only does the usage 
preserved represent the two apostles side by side, but 
Paul always occupies the right, which is the place of 

* II Tim. iv. 16. t Phil- H- i- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I47 

honor ; and this is why : as Peter was only gradually 
associated with him, the first place was naturally 
accorded to Paul, which originally belonged to him, 
and which no one has thought of taking from him.* 

For a long time the principal occupation of the 
Christians was to allay the differences which had 
arisen between Peter and Paul, and still more be- 
tween their disciples. Several books of the New 
Testament were written under the influence of this 
attempt at reconciliation — an object praiseworthy in 
itself, but which was not without lamentable conse- 
quences. The book of the Acts of the Apostles, by 
St. Luke, has for its essential aim the placing of Peter 
and Paul on the same plane. A sort of equilibrium 
between the two so different Christianities of the Juda- 
ists and of Paul is therein carefully observed. The 
Gospel of St. Luke, and even that of St. Matthew, 
although written at first in Hebrew, and for Christians 

* We have asked the motive for the primacy of Paul of 
well-instructed priests at Rome ; but they have found only this 
too ingenious reply : St. Peter, being at home, yields the most 
honorable place to St. Paul. The contrary is the truth : it is 
St. Paul who is at home. When Peter was first associated 
with him, no one dared attempt to give the former the place 
of authority; and when Peter, long afterwards, came to be 
considered as pope and vicar of Christ, the usage was already 
established. There are curious observations to be made on 
manj^ Roman customs of which the origin is forgotten, and 
which betray an anterior state of things of which they are 
perhaps the last vestiges. 



148 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS. 

of Judea, also bear the impress of this conciliatory 
thought.* 

IV. 

This spirit of mutual concession is a new fact in the 
history of the transformations of Christianity. Hither- 
to we have seen diverse tendencies — those of the Jews, 
of the Hellenists, finally of Paul, boldly accusing 
each other, and springing up in all their spontaneity. 
These could not fail to encounter and jostle each 
other in their free development ; and when war was 
declared, many efforts were to be directed towards 
conciliation ; a compromise was to be attempted. 
The moment of synthesis had come. 

But history teaches us that between tendencies so 
diverse and so unequal there never has been a real 
compromise. And in this instance a serious synthesis 
was impossible. In fact, when the two principles 
were brought together, it was found that, although 
Judaical Christianity might enrich itself with some 
fragments of Paul's doctrine without compromising its 
own existence, the Pauline doctrine of " the glorious 
liberty of the children of God^^ could not without 
injury be accommodated to the so-called precepts of 
Noah ; the Christianity of the spirit and of faith 

* Reuss, Hist, de la Theol, chretienne au Steele aJ)ostolique, 
II. 569. 577. 59I' 617. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



149 



grows weak and contradictory when it becomes sub- 
ject to external laws, and imposes upon itself ab- 
stinences without moral aim. 

In this case, then, as in many others, it was the 
lower principle that absorbed the higher. In reality, 
the Christianity of Peter became with the multitude, 
and contrary to the feeling of Peter himself, much more 
Judaizing than Pauline. The breach had been made ; 
and through it there entered into the church, after the 
precepts of Noah, many abuses, much more serious, 
renewed from Judaism, and some of which were found 
again in pagan rites ; others were introduced by com- 
promise ; and the purity of the spiritualism of Jesus, 
as well as the energetic protest of Paul, was for- 
gotten. 

We shall see the semi-Judaistic Christianity of St. 
Peter descend a declivity with constantly accelerated 
motion, and become by degrees the Catholic church. 

We would not be unjust towards any one ; we by 
no means pretend to deny to this powerful church, for 
a long time the only one in the West, whatever degree 
of grandeur and originality it possessed in other times ; 
but it is not by these characteristics that its origin is 
distinguished ; it was born of a compromise, of a 
middle term, which, assuredly, contained nothing 
either grand or original. 



150 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN. 

" Christianity contained far less of the marvellous than 
Neo-Platonism ; and it is probable that on account of its very 
reasonableness it was in many instances rejected by the phi- 
losophers." — Benjamin Constant, Du Polyth, B. xvii. c. 17. 



WE have not yet exhausted the series of diverse 
forms of Christianity which the New Testa- 
ment itself has preserved to us. There still remains 
one to be noticed, scarcely inferior in influence and 
originality to that of Paul, but very different. It is a 
Christianity far less developed and far less pure than 
that of Jesus, more ideal and more untrammelled by 
the past than that of the Judaists, more abstract than 
that of Stephen, and more mystical than that of Paul : 
it is that of John. 

The fourth Gospel differs from the three others in 
many respects : it is quite as much a theological trea- 
tise as a biographical narrative. Instead of begin- 
ning, like Luke, at the birth of John the Baptist, or at 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 15I 

his mission, like Mark, or at the nativity of Jesus, like 
Matthew, he begins by imitating the exordium of 
Genesis, and by transporting his reader beyond the 
world and time to the origin of things. He constant- 
ly insists, in the whole course of his book, on the 
dogma of the Iiicarfiate Word^ which he had set 
forth in his prologue ; and he refers to this first idea 
a great number of teachings and of details. He omits 
many events and discourses related by his predecessors, 
but gives other important facts which we know through 
him alone ; in some places his narrative is even more 
vivid and consecutive than theirs. In fine, his book 
bears a wholly peculiar stamp througli the very posi- 
tive individuality of the author. He has his own 
manner of thinking and speaking, and that a very 
characteristic manner, full of enthusiasm and of lofti- 
ness, strongly dogmatic, and impressed with an ex- 
alted mysticism. 

It is incontestable that this same language, so differ- 
ent from every other, and certain particular words 
which John loves to employ, are found under his pen, 
not only when it is the biographer who speaks, but 
also when it is his personages — John the Baptist, for 
instance, who was, however, very different from the 
Evangelist, or Jesus himself, who is so superior to 
them both. Even the discourses of the forerunner 
and of Christ are followed by reflections of the Evan- 



152 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

gellst so intimately connected and blended with their 
words that it is not possible to tell where these dis- 
courses end and the comments of the author begin.* As 
to the interlocutors of Jesus, the Jew^s, the v/oman of 
Samaria, Nicodemus, and sometimes the disciples, he 
shows them invariably as taking each word literally, 
in the sayings of Christ, and that even sometimes to a 
very absurd degree. 

Besides, John made use of a special phraseology, 
which is not found in the other sacred books, at least to 
the same extent as with him, but which was in great 
vogue among the philosophers of his time, whether 
Jews or pagans, especially in the Alexandrine school. 
To this philosophical phraseology belong certain ab- 
stract words of which John often makes a very beautiful 
use, such as the Word, the Life, the Truth, the Glory, 
the Light, the Darkness, the Fulness. 

A multitude of hypotheses have been formed in 
order to explain these differences between the book of 
John and the three other Gospels, as well as the prob- 
lems resulting therefrom. It has been asked, particu- 
larly, how this Galilean fisherman, the son of Zebedee, 

* John iii. 16-21 and 31-36. We cannot, however, conclude 
from this fact, with Reuss, that the conversations reported by 
John are merely fictitious outlines designed to introduce the 
W'ords and thoughts which he wishes to enounce. Nicodemus, 
and especially the Samaritan woman, appear to us living and 
"well-characterized individualities. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 53 

came to speak here the learned language of the phi- 
losophers of Alexandria ; and how, if, on the contrary, 
the book was written by an Alexandrian philosopher, 
there are found in it recitals too vivid to have ema- 
nated from any but an eye-witness of the facts. Per- 
haps the most plausible supposition is that of Professor 
Nicolas, who traces back the fourth Gospel to the 
two Johns, whose two tombs were shown in the fol- 
lowing centuries at Ephesus, that is, to the apostle, 
who is known to have been pastor in that city, and to 
one of his disciples, perhaps to another John, his suc- 
cessor.* The latter would have revised or completed 
the accounts of the old apostle, perhaps under his 
eye, or with his cooperation, adding to them his own 
thoughts. Thus would have been formed this strange 
book, in which Jesus is portrayed v\rith so much love, 
and in which are represented scenes so life-like, al- 
though the pencil which retraces them may have been 
impregnated with new colors, foreign to Palestine, and 
borrowed from the prevalent philosophy. However 
this may be, no one can doubt that there arose at an 
'early period, in Asia Minor, and perhaps in Egypt, a 
form of Christianity which, as we have seen, differs 
gi'eatly from all preceding ones. It is equally certain 
that this particular Christianity always claimed to be 
derived directly from the beloved disciple of Jesus, 

* Nicolas, Etudes critiques sur la Bible ^ N, T., etc. 



154 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

who is represented to us in a very ancient tradition as 
causing himself, in his extreme old age, to be carried 
to the assembly of the Christians, in order to repeat 
there this single injunction of his Master : '^My little 
childreit^ love one another T 

The following are the principal ideas which distin- 
guish the Christianity of John : — 

It was taught in Genesis that God created each of 
his works by a word. For example, he said, '-^Let 
there be lights and there was lights The Jews had 
given themselves up to endless dissertations on the 
creative Word^ which they also called divine Wisdom. 
In the Hebrew Book of Proverbs this wisdom is per- 
sonified.* The author puts into her mouth a long dis- 
course, in which she declares that she was with God 
from the beginning, that she was begotten by him be- 
fore all things, that she was with him when he created 
the world, and that she is his little child, on whom he 
has set his affection. This personification, or, as it 
has been called later, this hypostasis of Wisdom was in 
great favor in the Orient, and to her, under the name 
of St. Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), the Eastern Empire 
dedicated the largest and most magnificent Christian 
temple of Constantinople. 

The creative Word was personified as Wisdom, 
Before Jesus Christ, the Jewish philosophers of Alexan- 

* viii. 22-31. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 55 

dria had discussed and written a great deal in the 
Greek language concerning this Word^ or Logos, of 
which was made the expected Messiah, the Son of 
God, anterior to all things, the first of the divine efna- 
nations^ the first of the beings after God. On this 
vague and difiicult theme, the Alexandrine mind, 
which was a fusion of the Rabbinical mind with that 
of the Greek philosophers of the decadence, and of the 
pretended Sages of the East, did not cease to subtilize. 
Since Plato, the Greek world had believed in the pre- 
existence of ideas, of which all things were regarded 
as only the material forms, the realization in external 
order. The creative Word became one of these ideas, 
and the first of all — the idea of ideas. They came to 
distinguish in God two Wisdoms, or Words; the one 
enclosed in Him from all eternity, the other uttered in 
time and in the world. The first represented the Ab- 
solute ; the second was the Messiah, These notions 
are found, under various floating and changing forms, 
in the voluminous and very incoherent writings of a 
philosopher of Alexandria — the Jew Philo. They 
are connected with a vast system, to which we shall 
return — that of the Gnostics; a system diversified in a 
thousand ways, in which the Word takes its place 
either at the head or in the ranks of a long series of 
graduated emanations^ which descend from God to 
man, and lower still. 



156 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

It cannot be denied that the Evangelist appropriated 
some of these strange notions, in order to make of them 
titles of glory for Jesus. Already we have found, in 
the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians, two favorite 
terms of the Alexandrines and the Gnostics — ''^ ful- 
7iess^' and '-'- first-born of every creature^^ — applied to 
Jesus. Moreover, here are expressly attributed to him 
the designations, or rather the titles, consecrated by that 
school ; such as Word^ Life^ Lights Truths Glory ^ 
Only Begotten^ &c. John, like Paul, though seeking 
with ardor all that can magnify his beloved Master, 
ignores, or at least passes in silence constantly, abso- 
lutely, the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus, re- 
lated by Matthew and Luke. But, also like Paul, he 
represents the Son as existing before his appearance 
upon the earth, and as taking an active part in the 
creation of the world : ''''In the beginnhtg was the 
Word^ and the Word was with God^ and the Word 
was God, . . . All things were made by him,^^ 

While awaiting, in the progress of this study, the 
interpenetration of the pagan and Christian worlds, we 
notice here an alliance between the philosophy of the 
time and the religion of Jesus. In such an alliance 
the more vivacious and fruitful element gives much 
more than it receives. Now, in all its encounters with 
the pagan element, the Christian element was the 
more powerful ; but not to the point of preserving 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 157 

Itself from unworthy alterations. It carried the day, 
but not without being transformed to its detriment. 

If the simple and universal Christianity of Jesus 
gained in reality by translating itself into the whimsi- 
cal language of the thinkers of the day, if it had thus 
a greater hold on many minds, and created for itself 
in contemporary thought many points of attachment, 
it lost in pm'ity ; and from this point of view, the new 
transformation was a lamentable degeneracy. 

II. 

Meanwhile new horizons were being disclosed, and 
giving to all Christianity spiritual riches which had 
hitherto been confined to a small number of souls. 

John, like Paul, was a theologian. He is even the 
first who has written a dogmatic treatise with calm- 
ness and continuity, while Paul dogmatized according 
to the necessities of the moment, occasionally, and in 
letters, written, in every instance, wuth a view to some 
particular state of mind in his hearers. 

We need not hasten to conclude from this that either 
the Gospel of John or the Epistle w^hich accompanies 
it contains a great number of ideas, or a vast collec- 
tion of dogmas.* Properly speaking, there is found in 
them only one dogma — the divinity of the Incarnate 

* If we speak of only one Epistle of John, it is because the 
other two, extremely brief, are of far less importance. 



158 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Word; and one feeling — enthusiastic love, profound 
admiration for Jesus. The system of John, the result 
of an exalted contemplation and a mysticism of good 
quality, remains vague and slightly developed, al- 
though warm and full of inspiration. 

After having read Paul and the first three Evange- 
lists, one finds in John a new and very rich source of 
Christian traditions. It is he who has transmitted to us 
some of the sublimest words of Jesus, and those which 
will always have the most powerful influence upon 
humanity. '' God is a Spirit ; and they that worship 
Him must worship Him^^ — not in this or that holy 
place, not according to such or such rites, but — ^'' in 
spirit and in truths " The truth shall make you 
yree,^^ ''The words that I speak unto you^ they are 
spirit and they are life,^'' ''A new com^mand^nent I 
give unto you: That ye love one another, ^^ ''In my 
Father's house are many mansions, ^^ "I pray for 
them, which shall believe on m.e,^ that they all may be 
one; as Thou^ Father^ art in me^ a7td I in Thee,^^^ 

We have already pointed out the magnificent words 
in which Jesus, far from calling his religion unchange- 
able and finished, predicts its future developments. 

In fine, it is John, who found in his own heart, all 
penetrated as it was with the spirit of Jesus, that im- 
perishable utterance, " God is love J' f 

* John iv. 24; viii. 32; vi. 63; xiii. 34; xiv. 2; xvii. 20, 21. 
t Epistle iv. 8. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 59 

The majority of theologians and of modern critics 
are intensely preoccupied with the differences which 
they obsei-^^e between Jesus, as represented by the first 
three Evangelists, and the Jesus of St. John. It is im- 
possible to question the fact of this discrepancy ; but 
from our point of view there is nothing in it which 
ought to excite surprise. It is not astonishing that in 
the series of diverse Christian conceptions there should 
be found one in which the image, even, of the Savior 
is presented to us in a manner differing in some re- 
spects from all the rest. Here, as everywhere, unity 
is neither necessary nor desirable, beyond a certain 
extent. The rich variety of the Gospels would be 
utterly impoverished if these two forms of Christ 
were blended into one. Has it never happened that 
two different painters have made of the same per- 
sonage two portraits V\^hich are very little like each 
other, and yet both resemble their common model? 
Each of us has been able to make the experience 
that two of his intimate friends, who see him sep- 
arately, entertain concerning him wholly different 
opinions, which it would, perhaps, be difficult to rec- 
oncile. In our judgment the Jesus of St. John and 
that of his three predecessors are essentially the same ; 
only, in the first case, three writers, whose individuali- 
ty is moderately positive, have shown us the Christ of 
common tradition ; in the other case we perceive him, 



l6o FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

as it were, through a strongly-colored glass ; that is to 
say, as he appeared to a mystic and learned school, 
and particularly to a man who had passionately loved 
and venerated him, whose mind was essentially origi- 
nal, and whose testimony comes to us expressed in the 
technical language of an Oriental philosophy. It is 
to be presumed that the first portrait will be the more 
impartial and habitually exact ; but the second will 
perhaps give to certain favorite features greater depth 

and energy. 

III. 

The whole theology of John may be summed up in 
this single phrase, which is found textually in both 
his Gospel and his first Epistle: '''' God seiit his only 
begotten Son into the worlds that whosoever believeth 
on hiin should have everlastiitg lifeT * The essential 
aim of religion, according to John, is, that souls re- 
ceive the life of the Word made flesh ; they attain to 
it through light and love. Whilst, in the eyes of Paul, 
the Son of God abased and humiliated himself in be- 
coming man, John's point of view is wholly different. 
He admires in the advent of Jesus upon earth a pecu- 
liar splendor of holiness and of love. He represents 
him as having, here below, the fulness of grace and 
truth, and a glory peculiarly his own ; in fine, he 
shows him to us in a perpetual relation, in a continual 

* John iii. i6. i John iv. 9. 



OF CHISTIANITY. l6l 

interchange of relations, with theFather, whose ema- 
nations or attributes are constantly communicated to 
him.* Even the death of Jesus on the cross is, in his 
eyes, not an ignominy, but, on the contrary, a lifting 
up^'\ a gloriji cation, % The Divine Word is come into 
this world of darkness, hatred, and death, in order to 
bring to it light, love, and life. In the presence of this 
great fact the law of Moses has no longer any value ; it 
is only a witness formally rendered to a truth which has 
no more need of its testimony. Jesus is the way which 
leads to God, because he is the trutli (or light) ^ and 
the life. He leads us to the Father by his teaching, 
by his example, and by his death, endured for the good 
of men : that death purifies them ; the blood of Jesus 
washes, or rather carries, away their sins. But while 
the mystic idea of the union of the believer with his 
Savior is met with at every step in John's writings, 
there is nowhere found in them the notion of a Juridi- 
cal substitution. There is nothing in John concerning 
a Christ punished for us, or satisfying the divine jus- 
tice in our place. To live of the spirit, to be fed by 
Christ, — such is Christianity. At the entrance of the 
Christian's career is placed, very naturally, the new 
birth, regeneration, or spiritual birth, by which the 
normal or eternal life begins ; this, once begun, is never 

* John i. 9, 14, 51. t John iii. 14; xii. 32. 

X John xii. 23; xiii. 31. 

11 



1 62 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

to end ; it perpetuates itself through time and eternity, 
and death itself is for it only one development more. 

It is to be observed that John alone, among all the 
w^riters of the New Testament, is not preoccupied with 
the end of the world. This is not only because his 
book is more recent, and dates from a period when 
Jerusalem and the Temple having perished, while the 
world still continued to exist, it w^as no longer possi- 
ble to confound catastrophes so different. There is a 
higher reason why the disquieting speculations of the 
Jews concerning the final destiny of humanity held 
little place in this book. A theology of feeling, a 
mysticism of the heart, like that of John, does not take 
much interest in those grand scenes of horror and 
triumph which Israel loved to represent. If John 
speaks of what concerns the appearing {naqovGia^^ it is 
rather in reference to the Spirit than in reference to 
Christ, and only in his First Epistle, where he shows 
himself, perhaps, more trammelled than in the Gospel, 
by that class of ideas which had been so much abused 
by his contemporaries.* As to the last judgment, the 
Gospel of John does not seem to admit it. Jesus says 
there twice, that he '' came not to judge the zvorldJ^ 
''''He ihat believeth on hi77i is not coiideinned ; but he 
that believeth 7iot is co7ide77ined already^ because he 
hath not believed in the name of the 07ily begotten 

* I John ii. 28. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 63 

So7Z of God, And this is the condeiJination,, that 
light is co77ie into the ivoidd^ aitd fnen loved dark- 
ness rather than lights becaztse their deeds i^ere 
eviir * 

IV. 

After this exposition of the doctrines of John, the 
moment has come for us to indicate the variations of 
the Scriptures themselves on the dogma of the divinity 
of Jesus Christ. We must here discriminate betw^een 
an historical fact and three different explanations of 
this fact, three theories to w^hich it gave place. The 
fact itself is incontestable ; it is the profound and 
altogether peculiar impression which Jesus produced 
upon his contemporaries, and left after him on the 
earth ; this impression, in the highest degree religious, 
was the full recognition of his union with God, the 
strong and entire conviction that, according to his 
own language, " his Father was in him and he in his 
Father; " in him the divine shone with an incompa- 
rable lustre. 

Each witness explained to himself, in his own way, 
this so powerful personal influence of Jesus on the 
souls of men ; according to some, the Holy Spirit had 
descended upon him at the moment of his baptism, but 
had never mounted up again to heaven ; so that the 
Spirit of God dwelt in him with plenitude, and filled 
* John xii. 47 ; iii. 18, 19. 



164 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

his soul even to the end — beautiful image, and full 
of truth ! 

Others thought that Jesus was not the son of Mary 
and Joseph, but of Mary and the Holy Spirit. This 
figure, in accordance with which he had for father 
" the shadow of the fower of the Most High^^ * can- 
not be taken in a physical and literal sense ; but from 
a religious and spiritual point of view, it was at once 
just and grand. No one, so much as Jesus, was the 
son of the Spirit, the divine Spirit. 

Finally, we have seen applied to Jesus the Judeo- 
Alexandrine belief of the Incarnate Word. Jesus was 
identified with this Word which had so long occupied 
the Greek and Oriental philosophers of his time, as he 
was identified with the Messiah announced by the 
Jewish prophets. The Gospel of John declared to the 
world that Jesus of Nazareth was none other than this 
Word itself, in which Judea, Egypt, and Greece al- 
ready believed, and which was at that time the con- 
stant theme of their learned meditations and their 
Gnostic debates. 

Each of these three theories of the divinity of Christ 
is independent of the other two. It is not easy to 
harmonize them ; nevertheless John himself adduces 
the first and the third, although one cannot compre- 
hend how, if Jesus were the Divine Word, he should 

* Luke i. 35. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 65 

have needed to receive the Holy Spirit on the day of 
his baptism. There are, indeed, two perfectly dis- 
tinct traditions — that of Paul and John, who see in 
Jesus the preexistent Word ; and that of Matthew and 
Luke, who call him born of a Virgin. So far from 
one of the two ideas presupposing the other, if Jesus 
is the creative Word, it does not at all matter whether 
or not he may have had, physically, a mere man for 
father. 

The church did not look at this so closely. Public 
opinion, finding these three theories in the sacred 
books, accepted them all three, as glorious for Jesus, 
without taking the trouble to harmonize them. Peo- 
ple did not suspect that all which seemed to do honor 
to the Master might not be equally true, and so they 
made haste to believe it all. 

But the destinies of these three theories in Chris- 
tianity were very different. The one which rested on 
^the descent of the Holy Spirit at the moment of 
baptism had very little influence, and remained 
sterile. The doctrine which saw a miracle in the 
nativity of Christ was eagerly welcomed ; it would 
appear very simple to the Gentiles, accustomed to the 
idea of superhuman births ; and it furnished to the 
partisans of religious celibacy, always numerous in 
the East, a motive for honoring virginity in the person 
of Mary. Finally, the Judeo-Greek philosophy of 



1 66 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Alexandria, having thus seen its principal datum 
adopted by Christianity, did not stop there ; we 
shall see the theology of John become the favorite 
theme of Oriental speculations, whence arose an infin- 
ity of theosophic reveries and dogmatic quarrels. 
The more firmly the West attached itself to the prac- 
tical genius of Rome, and to the compromise of 
which Peter was the author, the more the East, never 
very positive, went astray in the train of i\lexandrines 
and Gnostics, though still claiming to be followers of 
St. John. 

If, instead of following out of sight his more or less 
legitimate disciples, we return to the Evangelist him- 
self, we shall remember that his teaching has been 
summed up in three words : lights love^ and life^ rep- 
resenting the attributes of the divine essence, which 
the Incarnate Word has come to reveal and impart to 
humanity.* Now, Paul makes Christian life consist 
in an analogous trilogy — faith^ love^ ho;pe. Is it not 
easy to recognize that if the idea of love is common to 
the two apostles, those of light and oi faith correspond 
to each other, as that of hoj^e brings us back to the 
notion of true and eternal life? In bringing together 
these two formulas, does not one see disclosed the 
richness of an identical fund, as well as the indepen- 
dence of the two great souls who have employed this 

* M. Reuss, II. 600. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 67 

common fund, each according to his own nature, and 
with full freedom ? 

It remains to us to see the two Christianities of Peter 
and of John acquire more and more power in Europe 
and in Asia, in the Roman world and the Greek 
world, while that of Paul, without ever being denied, 
vanishes, reappearing occasionally with new splendor 
in certain masters of Christian thought, as St. Augus- 
tine, but awaiting, in order to resume with the Refor- 
mation a large influence, the moment when Greece 
and Rome shall have done their work, when Con- 
stantinople shall have perished by the abuse of discus- 
sion and of dogma, and when Rome shall have lost 
half the Christian world by the abuse of authority. 



1 68 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER X. 

ROMAN CHRISTIANITY. 

" Tu regere im^perio j)ofulos^ Romane^ memento ; 
Bee tibi erunt «;^/e5." — Virgil's ^neid, VI. 851. 

I. 

IT results from the laws of the human mind, that 
every man, educated in any religion whatsoever, 
preserves during his whole life its impress, more or 
less profound, although he may have renounced this 
religion, or conceived an aversion to it, or even 
adopted another as different from the first as pos- 
sible ; in this latter case he always brings into his 
new church, unwittingly, and in spite of himself, 
something of that one which he has left. We have 
already seen an important exemplification of this 
truth among the Jews who had become Christians ; 
but as Jesus had sprung from the Jewish ranks, and 
as the new religion voluntarily founded itself upon the 
old, the fact which we are verifying is less salient 
among this people than among the Christians brought 
up in paganism. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 169 

We must not think that at the time of Christ the 
Israelites and those whom they called Gentiles were 
still, as formerly, ignorant of one another. All 
nations had been brought together, and in some de- 
gree blended, by the great forces of history. One 
forms, in general, no idea of the number of Jews 
whom events had fixed in all parts of the Roman 
empire, nor of the interchange of ideas which, in 
spite of their exclusiveness, had been established 
between them and the men of different cults. Rome, 
like all the principal cities of the world, contained a 
numerous Jewish colony, which, profiting by the dis- 
gust and lassitude created in the minds of their fellow- 
citizens through polytheism, often received proselytes, 
especially from among the women, and diffused into 
the bosom of Roman society itself some of its Ideas and 
habits. Phllo tells us that in the Transtiberlne quarter 
at Rome there lived a great number of Israelites, 
prisoners of war, who had been liberated b}^ the state, 
or ransomed either by their own resources or by their 
compatriots. Augustus comprised them in his distri- 
butions of provisions and money ; he consented, even, 
when these took place on the Sabbath, not to bestow 
the Jews' portion till the next day.* Juvenal and 
Suetonius describe the destitution to which the multi- 
tude finally came.f Josephus affirms, that in the 

* Leg. ad Caium, ed. Mangey, II. 568. 
t Juv. Sat. III. Suet, in Domitian. 12. 



170 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

year 66^ two hundred and fifty-six tliousand lambs 
were necessary to the Jews at Rome for the passover, 
making at least two millions five hundred thousand 
the number of Israelites present at the capital of the 
empire. This figure is evidently much above the 
reality.* Nevertheless, the number was so consider- 
able that efforts were made, at difTerent times, to 
diminish it. Under the reign of Tiberius, a crowd of 
Jews, or similar sectaries {yel similia sectantes)^ says 
Suetonius, was banished froin Rome by Sejanus ; | 
and Tacitus mentions the deportation of four thousand 
young men to Sardinia ; they were Israelites who lived 
at Rome. J 

The principal writers of the time testify to the 
influence of Jew^ish ideas among the Romans them- 
selves. Martial shows himself instructed in several 
features of Jewish customs. § The observance of the 
Sabbath has been remarked as in use among certain 
Romans, or has been reproached to them as a de- 
grading superstition by Ovid and Plutarch ; and the 
latter, in another place, makes a minute analysis, 
though mingled with serious errors, of Mosaism, || 

* B. J. VII. 17. t Suet, in Tib. 36. 

X Tac. Ann. II. '^S- % Mar. V. 29; XI. 95. 

II Ovid, De Arte Am. I. 76, 416. Plut., De Superst. VI. d^Z ; 
Sjmpos. IV. 5. Ed. Reiske. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I^I 

Persius speaks of a feast in honor of Herod, of the 
Sabbatli, and even of the circumcision, as of rites to 
which superstitious Romans submitted themselves.* 
Finally, Horace represents an importunate person, to 
whom pretexts are never wanting, and who feigns to 
respect the Sabbath in order not to scandalize the 
Jews.f 

But it is especially Juvenal who complains of the 
invasion of Jewish notions and practices in the educa- 
tion of the young Romans. He deeply commiserates 
those children whose parents have become adepts in 
Judaism. "Those," he says, ''to whom fate has 
allotted a father who respects the Sabbath, worship 
nothing but the clouds and the sky.| They reject 
pork with as much horror as though it were human 
flesh. They are taught to despise the Roman laws, 
while they learn, observe, and venerate all that Moses 
has transmitted, in a certain mysterious volume, con- 
cerning Jewish laws. But the blame is to be ascribed 
to the father, who sets apart each seventh day for idle- 

* Sat. V. i8o, etc. 

t Hor. I. i. XII. 

X It was a common belief among the Romans that the Jews 
adored the clouds and the sky, because their temples con- 
tained no images^ or other visible representations of the Deity. 
The presence of Jehovah was symbolized to the Hebrew mind 
only by the Sheckinah, or cloud overshadowing the Mercy- 
Seat. — Trans, 



172 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

ness, thinking it sinful to employ its hours in any of 
the useful occupations of life." * 

For a considerable period the government of the 
Caesars made no discrimination between the Israelites 
and the Christians, considering the latter as only forming 
one of the Hebrew sects. Thus Christians were some- 
times included in the decrees of banishment, which, it 
seems, were intended for the Jews alone. 

All that we have here said of Rome is applicable 
to the provinces of the empire, although in different 
degrees. We must imagine Paul, with the good 
tidings on his lips, penetrating into this pagan society, 
which was consumed with ennui^ ashamed of its polit- 
ical abasement, weary of proscriptions, of wars, and 
even of pleasures, more weary still of its own incre- 
dulity, but especially burdened with a profound dis- 
gust for its religion. The success of the apostle was 
immense. The Jews served him almost everywhere 
as connecting links between the truth which he 
brought and the polytheism of the Romans. Although 

* ^uidam^ sortiti metuentem sabbatha patrefn^ 
Nil frceter nubes et ccelt 7tumen adorant ; 
Nee distare ptitajit hunia7ta cariie suillam, 
Roma7ias aute^n soliti temnere leges^ 
Judaicum ediscunt et servant ac metuuntjus. 
Tradidit arcanum quodcujnque voluinine Moses, 
Sed pater hi causa, cut septima quceque fuit lux 
Ignava, et partem vitce non attigit ulla7n. 

Sat. XIV. 100, seq. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 73 

scorned and hated for their pride, their prejudices, and 
their indomitable resistance to Roman omnipotence, 
the Jews were, for that very cause, and by reason also 
of their strange faith in one invisible God, an object 
of curiosity, astonishment, and sometimes of sympathy, 
while their haughty narrowness and intolerance re- 
pelled the majority. It was the custom of the mes- 
sengers of the gospel, wherever they went, to first 
address the Jews in the synagogue on the Sabbath 
day. These preachers were for a time a scandal to 
the multitude. But almost everywhere some better 
disposed souls were favorable to them, were converted 
by their word, and able to put them into relation with 
the pagans who had become Jews, or who were in- 
clined to the worship of the true God. After such 
introduction the new religion made rapid conquests 
in the Roman population. The educated and culti- 
vated classes were the first to attach themselves to a 
church which appealed to all intelligences. In the 
space of thirty years all the important cities of the 
empire had among them churches so flourishing that 
persecution, when it burst forth, fortified them far 
more than it broke them up. Every martyr increased 
the number of the believers. Later, the term pagan^ 
which signified villager {paganus) w^as used to desig- 
nate the ignorant masses, who alone remained strangers 
to the new worship. 



174 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

11. 

The, at first, gradual entrance, and soon rapid ir- 
ruption, of an idolatrous multitude into the bosom of 
Christianity, the invasion of the church by the world, 
was not effected without detriment to the truth. The 
Christianity of Jesus was too lofty, too pure for this 
multitude escaped from the degrading cults of Olym- 
pus. The pagans were not able to enter en 7nasse 
into the church without bringing to it their habits, 
their tastes, and some of their ideas. 

In this respect Rome early exercised a fatal influ- 
ence ; inasmuch as she was the mistress of the world, 
she impressed upon everything that she was able to 
reach the indelible seal of her domination. Exces- 
sively superstitious at all times, it must not be forgot- 
ten that she substituted on the summit of the Capitol 
for the sacred hens, at which the augurs laughed, the 
Sagro Bambi7to^ a child Jesus in wood, which has 
its equipages and its livery, and is carried to heal the 
wealthy sick at their homes. No one can ever com- 
prehend what Rome was in other times, who does not 
know wdiat she makes of Christianity even to-day. 

Thoroughly faithful to her local traditions, Rome 
has never renounced various sonorous words and titles 
which have flattered her ears for more than twenty- 
five centuries. Thus, at the epoch of her first kings, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. l75 

she instituted a corporation of workmen commissioned 
to keep in repair the bridge of the Janiculum. This 
bridge, which united the rising capital to the highest 
of the hills which command it on the other side of the 
Tiber, was indispensable to the security of the city ; 
therefore the corporation, by reason of the necessity 
of its functions in hours of danger, was declared 
sacred, and its chief inviolable. It is true that as 
Rome extended her conquests, this college of carpen- 
ters soon lost all importance, and its functions the 
character of national defence which had been at first 
attributed to them. But the religious institution sur- 
vived the insignificant circumstances from which it 
sprung. The inviolability belonging to the presi- 
dency of this corporation was a very precious pre- 
rogative, and caused this sacerdotal office to be sought 
by the greatest personages. Thus the title of head 
of the bridge-makers {po7zs^ pontzfex)^ or Sovereign 
■PontifT, has been bequeathed by the carpenters of 
Tarquin, the first who bore it, to a long series of con- 
sular officials, to all the pagan emperors, and their 
first Christian successors, and, finally, to the popes, 
who still bear it, with that of Vicar of Jesus Christ. 
So far has Rome in every age, and even to our days, 
carried the passionate worship of local tradition ! 

To this taste she has not ceased to join the worship 
of the letter : her juridical spirit has formulated every- 



176 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

thing into laws, immutable rules, and precise texts^ 
imposed upon obedience and faith. 

Nor does the genius of Rome hesitate between a 
precise and literal interpretation of its code, were it 
hard even to cruelty, and a more generous, more lofty, 
but less strict interpretation. By this particular turn 
of mind Roman law has doubtless gained much in 
clearness and vigor ; but it is easy to divine what, in 
the hands of this inflexible genius, exercised by cen- 
turies of more and more universal dominion, would 
become of the religion of Jesus — a religion full of 
aspiration to God, of pardon, love, spiritual life. We 
may question whether there have ever existed in the 
world two spirits so incongruous as that of Jesus and 
that of Rome, the one freely regenerating souls by the 
love of God, the other culminating in an astute and 
implacable despotism, materializing everything and 
crushing all free aspiration with brute force and the 
letter of the law. 

When two geniuses so different are called to unite, 
it is naturally the more violent of the two w^hich pre- 
vails at first, only to be completely and forever con- 
quered when the right time comes. 

The new cultus could not obtain possession of the 
pagan temples, which were still occupied and sur- 
rounded by the respect of the multitude. It therefore 
installed itself as soon as possible in the basilicas. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1^7 

This name was given to vast covered porticos in- 
vented by Cato, divided by rows of columns into three 
or five lateral naves, where the people assembled 
under shelter, and at the extremity of which, in bad 
weather, the pretor sat to administer justice in a 
hemicycle called a conch. By degrees the converted 
pagans transported into these new temples nearly all 
the material of the polytheistic cults which they had 
abandoned, such as tapers,^ lighted la7nps^ incense^ 
and the vases placed at the entrance of tlie edifice to 
contain the lustral water, '^ 

A still more important innovation, which would not 
have been possible in Judea, was the introduction of 
images. Some of these could serve equally well for 
both religions. There are several in the new^ museum 
of St. John Lateran which can as well represent 
Apollo Nomios, or Mercury Criophoros, as the Good 
Shepherd ; and it is impossible, in some cases, to decide 
which the artist had in view. There are other monu- 
ments in which the gods of fable are mingled with the 
objects of Christian faith ; thus the river-god of the 
Jordan is present at the baptism of Jesus, in a mosaic 
of the Baptistery of Ravenna, and also at the transla- 
tion of Elias, represented on a sarcophagus at Rome. 
In a painting of the catacombs of this latter city, Mer- 

* Alfred Maury, Religions de la GHce antique, T. II. chap. 
viii. — TemJ>les et objets consacHs au culte, 

12 



178 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

cury Psychopompos is seen conducting a soul before 
the supreme tribunal, where Jesus and his mother are 
substituted for Phito and Proserpina. 

On a tomb of the same catacombs, containing sev- 
eral dead, we read that the Parca Lachesis destroyed 
them all in one bitter day : " ^ows ti7ia Lachesis 
mersit acerba dzeJ^ And this inscription, altogether 
pagan in form, is found on a tomb incontestably 
Christian. 

The attributes of Ceres and Bacchus have often 
been borrowed from polytheism in order to illustrate 
Christian fellowship ; and certain churches, like St. 
Constance at Rome, are adorned with vintage scenes 
in which bacchanal genii represent the words of Jesus 
concerning the vine and the branches.* 

There are other cases in which mythological per- 
sonages serve as emblems of Christian truths. Thus, 
at Vienna and Rome, Orpheus is portrayed in the 
midst of ferocious beasts tamed by his music, as a 
symbol of Jesus regenerating sinful souls b}^ his word. 

The religious subjects which are found on antique 
Christian sarcophagi, in the mosaics and paintings of 
the first centuries of the church, were nearly always 
symbolic. Most frequently Jesus was represented in 
them as the Good Shepherd, bearing on his shoulders 
the lost sheep ; occasionally as instructing the Twelve 
or the people. 

* John XV. 1-9. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 79 

The renewal of life, which is the burden of the 
gospel, was indicated by the resurrection of Lazarus ; 
and the spiritual nutriment furnished by the gospel 
was typified in the change of water into wine, or in 
the multiplication of the loaves, or in the Last Supper. 
The Old Testament, too, was turned to account by the 
arts ; but what the artists sought in it were symbols 
of certain Christian ideas : the types of salvation, as 
the ark and the dove of Noah ; Abraham, at the mo- 
ment of sacrificing Isaac, receiving hifn in a figure^ 
that is, by a sort of resurrection ; * still more frequent- 
ly, the apologue of Jonas, cited b}^ Jesus himself;! ^^^ 
translation of Elias to heaven ; Job passing from ex- 
treme misery to a second life of riches and greatness ; 
Daniel remaining alive in the lions' den ; Moses caus- 
ing a spring to gush from the rock, or taking off his 
shoes because the ground on which he walks is holy, — 
these were so many allegories, in which the primitive 
art of the Christians delighted. To them should be 
added the baptism of Jesus, often reproduced ; and the 
dove descending upon the head of the Savior in order 
to point him out to public piety. The prayer of the 
faithful, or his consecration to God, was represented 
by forms of or antes — praying men or women, clothed 
in long robes, standing with their open arms extended 
and elevated. 

* Heb. xi. 19. t Matt. xii. 39-41. 



l8o FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

In all this cycle of Christian emblems it will be seen 
that the death of Jesus holds no place. This is, first, 
because other ideas — those of a renovating instruction, 
a new life, and an unhoped-for salvation — occupied 
all minds ; secondly, because the artistic genius of the 
ancients was averse to representing a man nailed upon 
the instrument of punishment : ancient art rejected 
such themes as hideous and ignoble.* Finally, cruci- 
fixion w^as regarded not only as infamous, but also as 
ridiculous : in the Latin comedies it was made the 
perpetual subject of coarse threats and railleries in 
speaking to slaves. Thus it was not till six centuries 
after his death that artists began to venture upon the 
representation of Christ crucified. The first delinea- 
tions of this kind are never isolated, but form part of 
a representation of the whole scene of Calvary. The 
crucifix dates in the church only from the end of the 
seventh century. That strange habit was of very slow 
growth which consists in portraying the dead Christ 
much more than the living : as though the shadow of 
the cross were to efface the whole work and career of 
the Master ; as though the contemplation of his pun- 
ishment were to absorb all the thoughts of the faith- 
ful, leaving them no leisure to meditate on his life, his 
example, and his teachings ! 

* See Lessing's admirable essays, How the ancients re^re- 
sented deaths and LaokoOn, — Trans. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. l8l 

As for the thought of representing God, it would 
have excited horror in the Christians issued from Juda- 
ism ; and this feeling contributed to cause the image 
of Jesus to be placed wherever the logic of religious 
sentiment among the pagans, or the influence of invet- 
erate habits would have led them to place the image 
of a god. They were content, during several centu- 
ries, to indicate the divine presence by a hand de- 
scending from a cloud, or encircled by a halo. This 
hand is seen on various sarcophagi, above the portal 
of San Zenone, at Verona,* and in a very ancient bas- 
relief, in which Isaiah receives from Jehovah the book 
of his prophecies, standing between the goddess Night 
and the little god Lucifer, 

Sometimes even the human form was not given to 
Jesus : through an excessive scruple, or through a 
taste for symbolism, he was represented by a lamb, 
and the diverse personages with whom he is related 
by other lambs : thus one lamb baptizes another, upon 
which descends the dove. But later, a council in 
Trullo forbade this kind of images, as not sufficiently 
respectful. 

The meaning which was attached to all these sculp- 
tured or painted forms was exactly the same as among 

* The hand here alluded to has also the fore and middle 
fingers extended, and the two others bent, in the act of the 
Latin benediction. These bas-reliefs evidently belong to the 
first part of the twelfth century. — Trans, 



l82 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

the pagans. At first they were regarded as merely 
simple representations : it was later, and only in par- 
ticular cases, that images received a miraculous, and, 
SO to speak, personal character, as had already hap- 
pened in paganism. After, as before, Christianity, 
it was finally believed that certain images had fallen 
from heaven, or been made by celestial hands. Thus 
was borrowed from the idols the itinibus^ which, under 
the name of aureola^ is worn to-day by personages 
considered sacred in the Catholic iconography. 

It is natural that the church should venerate the 
memory of the martyrs who were its glory. But a sim- 
ple souvenir was not enough : the anniversary of their 
suflferings and their triumph was celebrated on their 
tomb ; temples were erected on the place of their tor- 
ture, and their bones consecrated therein with honor. 
Thus was gradually transferred to Catholic saints and 
their mortal remains the worship which the pagans 
paid to the relics of Theseus in Scyros, to the bones 
of Geryon at Thebes, to the hair of Medusa at Tegea, 
to the head of Orpheus in Antissa, and elsewhere to 
the shoulder of Cecrops, preserved in a bronze reli- 
quary, or to the toe of Pyrrhus, which worked mira- 
cles.* This custom was not rare in antiquity. Many 

* See, on all these and the following facts, Alfred Maury, 
Relig, de la Grtch^ 1. c, and Daille, Adversus Latinorum de 
cultiis relig, object o traditionem. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 83 

Christians carried their sick to the tomb of the mar- 
tyrs, as ill the land of Thyrea they were borne to the 
tomb of Polemocrates, son of Machaon, and grand- 
son of Esculapius. Long ago Horace ridiculed a 
miracle wholly analogous to that of St. Januarius — 
periodical trickery, then perpetrated by the priests of 
Gnatia, a little city near Naples. The translations 
of holy bodies, which became frequent in the middle 
ages, and which, it was said, were often commanded 
by an order from heaven, reproduced exactly facts 
older than Christianity : it was thus, for example, that, 
in accordance with a response of the oracle of Del- 
phi, the translation of the bones of Areas, son of the 
nymph Callisto, had been made from Msenala to 
Mantinea. 

In default of their bodies, the church preserved as 
relics those objects which had belonged to holy 
personages : this is what had been done before her 
day for the heroes. Athens was proud of being able 
to show the galley of Theseus ; Cyzicus, the stone 
which had served as an anchor for the Argonauts ; 
Olympia, the sword of 'Pelops ; and Phlionte, his 
chariot, which was preserved in the temple of Ceres. 

In time, the principal Christian churches, like the 
pagan temples, possessed a treasury, which w^as filled 
with offerings of great price. Nothing contributed 
more to its enrichment than the ex votos. These were 



184 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

certain objects promised by individuals to chosen gods 
in case of recovery from sickness or escape from dan- 
ger. Most frequently the image of the diseased limb 
was suspended in the temples, like those hands and 
eyes of stone w^hich can be seen in the museums of an- 
tiquities at Naples and London, or like those innumer- 
able arms, legs, and heads of vs'ax, wood, and silver, 
w^hich decorate the majority of Catholic churches 
to-day. 

The new Christians preserved, with few changes, 
the pilgrimages to sacred tombs, the funeral rites of 
the end of the year, the theories or processions, the 
Ainbarvalia^ or Rogations^ the Fraternities {ciiltores 
Herculis^ Diaiice et Anti7toi^ jfovis)^ and other cus- 
toms of paganism.* 

We shall see the worship of Mary introduced later. 
She never figures in the most ancient Christian rep- 
resentations except as a secondary personage, either 
as in the example before cited, where she is sitting 
with her son, in the place of Proserpina, by the side 
of Pluto, on the supreme tribunal (this case, how- 
ever, is extremely rare), of wdien she bears in her 
arms the infant Jesus, adored by the shepherds, or 

* See, concerning these fraternities and a multitude of pagan 
practices, usages, and symbols, which were admitted into the 
Christian catacom.bs, the recent great work entitled Ro?na 
sotterranea Christiana^ descritta ed illustrata dal cav. G. 
B. de Rossi. Tome I. Rome, 1864. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 85 

especially by the Magi, which is ver}^ frequent ; for to 
the coming of the wise men of the East was attached 
the idea of the future universality of Christianity. 

Moreover, the same causes which preserved poly- 
theistic usages in the Christian religion w^ere sure to 
introduce, sooner or later, the worship of Mary. The 
pagans had often deified woman, and especially the 
virgin. Proserpina, Diana, Vesta, Isis even, and 
especially Minerva, had been adored as virgin god- 
desses ; and every one knows that at Athens the prin- 
cipal temple of Pallas is still called the Parthenon, 
or temple of the Virgin. 

Antiquity had consecrated to many of its gods and 

goddesses corporations of men and women, of whom 

several were vowed to celibacy. It is known that 

the church finally established these colleges under 

other names. 

III. 

It remains for us to notice only the mysteries and 
the sacrifices as having exerted a still more powerful 
influence upon Roman Christianity than did any or all 
of the different rites which we have just enumerated. 

We have seen * that polytheism, in its decline, had 
found in the celebration of the mysteries a sort of reju- 
venation, either by reason of the philosophical ideas 
which were there taught under a dramatic form, or 

* Chapter II. sec. iv. 



1 86 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

because the mysteries, being interdicted to the com- 
mon people, were freed from the most disreputable 
superstitions. As these ceremonies contained what 
was most exalted in the ancient religion, they soon 
exerted a considerable influence upon Christianity. 
The services of the synagogue, consisting of chants, 
prayers, readings and oral teachings, in which Christ 
and his apostles had joined, was not sufficiently theat- 
rical in character to suit the tastes of the new worship- 
pers. Hence the most solemn acts of religion were 
made secret. The doctrirte of the Master, who had 
said, "' What ye hear in the ear^ that preach ye upon 
the house-tops^'' was taught with the closest precau- 
tions. The Christians were compared to the initiated, 
the catechumens to the candidates, the pagans to the 
populace who were excluded from the sacred myste- 
ries. Thus were adopted anti-Christian ideas of ex- 
clusiveness and intolerance, pagan in origin, and 
directly opposed to the charity of Jesus, to his exam- 
ple, to his parables of the tares and the net^^ and to 
the whole spirit of his gospel. 

Some of the oldest churches existing are, like that 
of St. Ambrose at Milan, and St. Emmeran at Rat- 
isbon, preceded by an atrium^ or court of the cate- 
chumens, the threshold of which must not be passed 
by them, and still less by the pagans, while the com- 

* Matt. xiii. 25 and 47. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 87 

munion was being celebrated in the sanctuary. Later, 
the penitents not reconciled with the church, and 
those who had failed in constancy under persecution, 
were likewise obliged to remain outside of the tem- 
ple. The Christian worship, thus disfigured, might 
have been inaugurated by the essentially pagan utter- 
ance of Horace, '*^ Odi frofa7izt?n vulgus et arceoT * 

These intolerant usages borrow^ed from polj'theism, 
these useless precautions against the uninitiated, the 
severe discipline instituted against the Christians 
called Lapsi (fallen or apostate), filled the church for 
several centuries with cruel injuries, recriminations, 
and discords. 

This assimilation to the mysteries proved the strong- 
est encouragement to the encroachments of the clergy. 
In the mysteries, in fact, the hierophant possessed 
great powxr, and rigorous penalties served to repress 
the least infraction of secrecy or order. As soon as 
the church began to exercise discipline, a tribunal and 
judge became necessary. If St. Ambrose was heroic 
when he closed the doors of the church of Milan 
against the Emperor Theodosius, all covered with the 
blood of the Thessalonians, the right which the bishop 



* ^' I hate the profane populace and exclude them." Benja- 
min Constant has collected many proofs of pagan intolerance 
in his De la Relig. V. 184, and Du PolytJi. II. 255, 307. 
See also Montesquieu, Grand, et Die, des Rojn, chap. xvi. 



1 88 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

or priest arrogated of closing the church to U7irec' 
onciled sinners produced, frequently, the gravest 
abuses. Superstition mingled with this custom. 
Christians naturally associated the church with heav- 
en ; it was believed that heaven itself was shut to those 
for whom the church would no longer open its doors ; 
God's pardon depended, in public opinion, upon the 
pardon of a priest, and eternal salvation was found at- 
tached to the observance of an ecclesiastical statute. 

The church retained also the dramatic element of 
the mysteries. It is well known that in the middle 
ages this name of mysteries served to designate cer- 
tain great dramas, like those of Eleusis, which were 
played for several days, and in which the whole Chris- 
tian religion was represented. Not only the person- 
ages of the Old and New Testaments, men, angels, 
and demons, as well as Jesus Christ, and God him- 
self, but virtues and vices, a multitude of abstract 
beings, constituted the actors, and the scene was lo- 
cated by turns on earth, in hell, and in paradise. 

Besides these exceptional and costly ceremonies, 
the tendency to render the cuUms as theatrical as pos- 
sible was encouraged in every manner ; and even in 
our days, in the principal churches, the death of Jesus 
and the office of the tenebrce are made a real mystery, 
sung by several choirs, in imitation of those of pagan 
Greece. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1S9 

Similar prepossessions gradually transformed the 
communion into a secret act, and almost into a drama. 
Jesus had made of it a commemoration of his fare- 
well repast ; the bread and the wine had been given 
by him as emblems of his body, which death was 
about to break, and of his blood, which was soon to 
flow : but this was not enough ; the Christians wished 
to make, and did make, of the communion a sacrifice. 

We must remember that the idea of sacrifice was 
inveterate, and universally admitted among all people, 
whether Jews or pagans. The origin of this idea was 
most simple. The primitive man had imagined that it 
was possible to gain the divine good will by gifts : 
the East thought to purchase the favor of Heaven, as 
of the great ones of the earth, by presents. Seeking 
nothing at first but abundant and sure food, neither 
knowing nor esteeming any other good, man reserved 
for his Master the most exquisite meats : the first of- 
ferings were fruits, grain, milk, ^vine. oil, and salt.* 
When, at a later period, man had learned to kill ani- 
mals for his nourishment, he ofiered to Heaven the 
choicest part of the viands which were his food. 
Soon he resented whole animals for God. God's part 

* Ante, deos Jiornitii quod conciliare valebat., 

Far erat et puri liicida 7Jiica salts, Ovid, Fast. I. 337. 

*' At first, Avhat had power to reconcile the gods to man 
Was a little corn, and a shining grain of pure salt." 



190 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

was always burned, and the sacrifice far excelleiice 
was the holocaust, in which the entire victim was con- 
sumed in honor of the Divinity. But the ordinary 
sacrifice consisted in this : from every head of cattle 
slaughtered in the shambles was first deducted a por- 
tion for God. Hence it resulted that the instant in 
which the victim was slain was that in which reli- 
gion reclaimed its rights. Thus the death of the ani- 
mal became the essential moment ; the death became 
a rite. The cultus was tragic. The blood of the 
victim was shed with solemnity. In spite of the 
pomp which surrounded it, the cultus of the Jews 
and the Gentiles was a vast scene of butchery, which 
to-day would be rendered hateful to us by the sight of 
so many animals slaughtered, of their flesh divided, 
of their entrails and their blood, as well as by the 
odor of burned meats and fat. Nevertheless, till Jesus 
Christ came, this was the essential form of the differ- 
ent cults. On every occasion were offered sacrifices 
varied in a thousand ways. All the most diverse feel- 
ings of piety were thus expressed : gratitude, prayer, 
repentance, had only this strange, gross language. 

It is conceivable that emotions of grief and anguish 
were best expressed by this hideous and bloody cere- 
monial. Therefore expiatory sacrifices played a great 
role in antiquity : still their number and importance 
have been exaggerated, and it must not be forgotten 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I9I 

that a multitude of sacrifices were acts of pure adora- 
tion, of gratitude and religious joy, without any sinis- 
ter mixture of repentance or of terror. Nevertheless, 
we have seen what grievous trouble haunted souls 
during that agitated century when Roman freedom 
perished in waves of blood. Conscience awoke in 
the bosom of all religions, and imperiously demanded 
its rights. Men felt deeply unhappy and dissatisfied 
with themselves, and sought to appease by external 
acts the interior God — the cry of conscience. Fear 
rendered them cruel ; and a victim was made to suffer 
in order to pacify, at its expense, an enraged God. 
This egoistic and cowardly notion of substituting a 
weak and innocent creature for criminal man, this im- 
moral procedure, which was supposed to be accepta- 
ble to God, was the highest resource of guilt : terror 
sought refuge in terror.* The ancient world, to the 
epoch of Jesus, sought in vain in all its rites for some 
sacrifice, and by preference a bloody sacrifice, which 
should expiate the faults committed, and become a 
moral compensation for them, thus gaining the judge 
while sparing the criminal. 

* Cor fro corde, precor^ pro fibris accipe fibras : 
JFIanc a7iimam v obis pro meliore damns. 

Ovid, Fast. 'VI, 161. 
"Accept, I beseech thee, this heart for mine, these fibres for 
mine : we offer this living creature in place of one of greater 
worth." 



192 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Imagine, then, the astonlstment, the wonder, the 
ineffable joy which seized these souls, long tormented 
by foolish terrors, when they heard preached with 
persuasive authority the One and Infinite God as a 
God of love, as a forgiving Father, and when they 
were shown, since images of expiation and of blood 
were still necessary to them, that the sacrifice of the 
Holy One and the Just had rendered expiatory rites 
henceforth and forever useless, and that Jesus, su- 
preme victim, had reconciled to themselves and to 
God all souls that would unite themselves to him ! 
It was at that time not at all by fortuitous metaphor, 
but in the universal acceptation of language, or, rather, 
through a deep-rooted need of these half-emancipat- 
ed consciences, that Jews and Gentiles were pleased 
to liken the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to a sacrifice of 
expiation, an atonement. 

We have seen that, by reason of the coincidence of 
a national feast with this death, the paschal lamb was 
blended with all these images, although the sacrifice 
of this lamb was an offering, not of expiation, but of 
gratitude and joy. Thus was formed in the church a 
theory of the sacrifice of Jesus, which finally succeeded 
in changing, in the gravest manner, the most touching 
of all rites — the Communion. 

When the Lord's Supper had become a mystery, it 
was regarded as a representation of the sacrifice of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 93 

Jesus Christ, taught and portrayed very much as was 
the immortality of the soul in the mysteries of Eleusis. 
Instead of commemorating the repast of Jesus with 
his apostles, it was made a sort of secret drama, in 
•which were represented by the bread his broken body, 
and by the wine his shed blood, associated with all 
those ideas which recalled to the Gentiles and to the 
Jews a sacrijBce and an expiation. By degrees the 
Lord's Supper itself came to be called a sacrifice ; but 
centuries of increasing darkness were yet necessary 
before the idea of a dramatic representation was itself 
effaced, as it had before effaced that of a simple me- 
morial, and the belief became prevalent that the sacri- 
fice of Jesus was not represented, but really and ma- 
terially renewed in the Eucharist. Then the bread 
was no longer bread, but, as the Council of Trent has 
officially decided, Jesus Christy with his body^ his 
bloody his soul^ and his divinity. Then the church 
was able to teach that the priest, in consecrating the 
host, creates God {creatura Creator em creai)^ and 
that, after having created Him, he sacrifices Him in 
eating Him {manducando sacrijicat). 

This was the excess, the acme of the literalism of 
Rome, the result of the application of the narrow 
and inflexible Roman genius to the Christian thought, 
which was Oriental and Jewish in its primitive form, 
infinitely broad and lofty in its essence. 
13 



194 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

For the present it suffices us to establish the fact 
that Christianity, having lost under the influence of 
Peter the purity of its spirituality, having already 
adopted some of the gross material notions of Juda- 
ism, received also all those of polytheism which were 
not too revolting. It is possible that under this cor- 
rupted and over-burdened form Christianity may have 
drawn the pagan multitudes into its bosom more 
easily and quickly than it could otherwise have done. 
But there was nothing very serious in exterior conver- 
sions. It was not thus that Paul or John meant to 
form disciples, that is, imitators and followers of 
Jesus, illuminated by his spirit and living from his 
life. 

We have remarked, in respect to Johannean or 
Greek Christianity, that the East appropriated the 
speculations of John concerning the Word^ and that 
this form of Christianity was lost in an excess of 
theosophic reverie and mystic dogma. In the West 
it was wholly different : wedded and materialized by 
the harsh and dry Roman mind, Christianity became 
external, pompous, dictatorial, and ended by constitut- 
ing a political power which was the strongest of all 
in the middle ages, but which is to-day the weakest. 

The source of living water which Jesus offered to 
the Samaritan woman soon lost its freshness, and 
gradually changed its nature with the division of its 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 95 

current. The East transformed its waters into intangi- 
ble vapors, which lost themselves in space. The West 
made of them a block of ice, which for a long time 
resisted everything, which to-day, though constantly 
melting and diminishing, still obstructs by its inert 
mass the divine river, and must soon be borne away in 
its overwhelming flood. 



196 FIRST HISTORICAL TRx\NSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE CHRISTIANITIES OF THE FIRST FATHERS OF 
THE CHURCH AND OF THE FIRST HERETICS. 

** That the religious life does not depend soleh^ or essential- 
ly upon the nature of dogmas ... is proved by the fact 
that it is repeatedly found with dogmas wholly opposed, 
among sects which have in common only a general adhesion 
to the gospel and to those eternal dogmas without which 
a religion is not even conceivable." — Samuel Vincent, 
Vues, I. 66. 



FROM the time of the apostles to our own days, 
a long series of writers or of doctors have taught 
Christianity with great freedom and still greater 
variety. The Roman church very arbitrarily gave 
the name of Heretics to such of them as did not seem 
sufficiently submissive to her authority : she called 
the others her Fathers : but this classification is 
as confused as it is false. Tertullian and Origen, 
two of the most eminent Fathers, were heretics ; and 
the church has limited their punishment to loss of 
canonization, although both of them had certainly a 
better right to the title of Saint than several of those 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 97 

to whom it has been given, as, for example, the irasci- 
ble and violent St. Jerome. 

On the other hand, St. Justin the Martyr v^as far 
from being orthodox, and St. Cyprian took an attitude 
of open resistance to the Bishop of Rome, which, in 
other times, would have caused his excommunica- 
tion. 

From our point of view the word Jieretic has no 
meaning, because the word orthodox has none. As 
doctrinal unity exists only in the teachings of Jesus, 
from which every one necessarily and involuntarily 
separates himself, Jesus alone is orthodox, and in rela- 
tion to him every one else is more or less heretical. 
As to the church, she has varied constantly and in 
many ways ; we do not make this charge in reproach, 
since she could not do otherwise ; but we reduce to 
their just value the titles of Saints, Fathers, and Here- 
tics, which she has distributed witli questionable dis- 
cernment ; and this value, null in fact, is very in- 
considerable even as an indication of the tendencies 
of the individuals upon whom those titles were con- 
ferred.* 

It would require more space than we can here allow 

* Excellent and profound studies on the Fathers will be 
found in the masterly work, now too much neglected, of 
Daille : Traicte de V Employ des Saints Ptres pour le J^ugement 
des differents qui sont aujourd'hui en la Religion* 



198 FIRST HISTORIC Al. TR.\NSFORMATIONS 

to mention the variety of transformations which Chris- 
tianity underwent in the hands of different theologians 
from the apostles to Constantine. In this history 
there was frequently to be seen the true evangelical 
sentiment reigning especially in the bosom of what 
is called heresy, the world occasionally more Christian 
than the church, and the fire of the Spirit preserved 
sometimes by those who were accused of extinguish- 
ing it, and sometimes extinguished by the clergy, the 
theologians, or the princes, who believed themselves 
commissioned by God to sustain and renew it. 

It will suffice us to indicate the ideas and the men 
who exerted the greatest influence upon the minds 
of that period. The Judaizing party did not enter 
wholly into the compromise proposed by Peter ; but dif- 
ferent causes destroyed gradually what still remained 
of its provisions. Time was the stronger ; for at 
bottom Jewish Christianity was nothing else in Chris- 
tendom that a minimuin of Judaism, the balance of an 
old account opened between Israel and Jehovah ; it 
was one of those parties of legitimacy which time 
rapidly disintegrates, as it has done for the Jacobites 
of England under the house of Hanover ; besides, the 
Stuarts ended by disappearing. Events ordinarily 
put an end to these useless dreams of restoration. 
When Jerusalem was ruined and the Temple burned 
by a soldier of Titus, Judaizing Christianity had re- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 99 

ceived its death-blow. Many of its adherents had 
taken refuge at Pella, a little city situated in the 
mountains of Galaad, to the east of the Lake of Gen- 
nesaret. When they issued from their retreats, their 
heretofore predominant influence in the church was 
lost, and their old hopes were annihilated. Facts had 
decided against them, and the Temple had disappeared 
in the flames without involving, as the Jews had so 
often predicted, the destruction of the whole world. 
It was not only unnecessary, but impossible, to remain 
any longer strictly faithful to the Mosaic law. 

Ideas are more slow in disappearing than physical 
facts. There continued to be diverse sects, which, as 
was then said, Judaized. Pella was the centre of a 
celebrated group of Jewish Christians, who assumed 
the doleful name of Ebioiiites (Hebrew ebion^ pover- 
ty), or poor. The most characteristic features of their 
doctrine were an implacable hatred towards Paul, a 
persistent attachment to Moses and to all that they 
were able to observe of his law (circumcision, fasts, 
&c.), as well as the very emphatic denial of all divine 
character in Jesus Christ. They were subsequently 
confounded with the Elcesaites^ or Sampseans, who 
believed that the same divine emanation had twice in- 
carnated itself, first in Adam, secondly in Jesus. Ac- 
cording to these whimsical dreamers, the primitive 
religion, corrupted by the evil principle, had been 



200 FIRST HISTORICAJL TRANSFORMATIONS 

restored by Moses in his law ; then, changed anew by 
the same agent of destruction, it had been finally re- 
established by Jesus. It is curious enough that this 
Christology, assuredly very heterodox, should be that 
of the Clementine Homilies — writings attributed by 
the church to St. Clement of Rome, co-laborer of St. 
Paul, and pope. 

This latter sect, as one can easily perceive, is scarce- 
ly Judaizing except in name ; its spirit is wholly dif- 
ferent from that of Israel. In truth, Jewish Christian- 
ity had become what the party of the past always 
and everywhere becomes : it had been insensibly ex- 
tinguished. 

II. 

The strange sect which we have just seen absorb- 
ing the last remnants of Jewish Christianity intro- 
duces us to the vast labyrinth of the Gnostic sects. 
Already we have noted some traces of their ideas 
in St. Paul, and their more powerful influence over St. 
John. It is now time to give some account of their 
system. 

The name common to these very numerous and 
diverse sects comes from the Greek word yvwaig^ 
knowledge. Pythagoras and Plato had employed this 
term in the sense of a superior knowledge. The 
Judeo-Greek philosophers of Alexandria gave it still 
more precision : they claimed that the contemplation 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 20I 

of the Infinite is a means of study superior to every 
other. The very notion of philosophy^ w^hich means 
search or love of wisdom, seemed surpassed in this 
pursuit, w^hich therefore received the ambitious name 
of theosophy^ signifying divine w^isdom or contem- 
plation. When meditation entirely supersedes re- 
search, w^hen dreams usurp the office of reason, 
thought drifts vs^ithout goal or compass on an imagi- 
nary sea w^hich has no limit, since it does not exist : 
thus the most abstract theories of Greek philosophy 
blended in a thousand forms, during its decline, with 
the confused speculations of Oriental reverie ; and this 
movable chaos invaded Christianity to its great detri- 
ment. 

The following is the parent idea of all these sys- 
tems : God personifies His own attributes, such as 
wisdom, word, and an infinity of others. These 
personified attributes emanate from Him : each of 
these emanations is called an ^Eon, One of these 
^ons, and the last of all according to many Gnostics, 
is the author of the universe, or the Demiurgus ; 
some declare that he created the world out of nothing, 
but the majority, that he only fashioned matter, which 
is as eternal as God Himself. The Gnostics of Alex- 
andria attribute the existence of evil to matter ; those 
of Syria accuse the -^on Demiurgus, which they 
represent as malevolent, of being its cause. Since 



202 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

man is wholly enveloped with matter and with evil, 
another ^rEon (the Christ) has intervened to save 
humanity. But Jesus was not this yEon itself; he was 
only its delegate, or, according to others, a simple ap- 
pearance without reality ; and every man can obtain 
salvation by contemplation, joined to severe and long- 
continued mortification of the flesh. The Gnostics 
interpreted Scripture by the allegorical method, and 
exscinded from it what must be rejected as coming 
from the Demiurgus. The idea of the impurity of 
matter produced in this sect not only the most cruel 
abstinences, but also wholly opposite abuses, leading 
frequently to extreme licentiousness. 

We may point out particularly the schools of Alex- 
andria, which were pantheistic ; those of Syria, in 
which prevailed the Oriental idea of two principles, 
one good, the other evil, disputing with each other for 
the government of the universe ; and finally, those of 
Asia Minor, less absorbed in contemplation, whose 
disciples were fierce enemies of Judaism, admiring 
nothing of the New Testament but the writings of St. 
Paul and St. Luke, and even these not without erasing 
from them everything that appeared to favor Judaism. 

It is easy to see what a vast interval separates the 
Gnostic schools, with which Judaizing Christianity 
finally coalesced, from those for which even the 
Letters of St. Paul had to be expurgated, as too little 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 203 

opposed to the Jewish spirit. While the ultra-conser- 
vatives of Judaism composed against Paul and against 
the Gnostic Marcion a kind of romance, which is false- 
ly called the Clementine Homilies^ there existed an 
extreme party of anti-Judaizing Gnostics, who, through 
hatred of Jewish exclusiveness, systematically rehabili- 
tated all the personages reprobated in the Old Testa- 
ment, calling themselves Cainites, in honor of Cain, 
the first criminal of all, whom they made the type of 
every virtue, and taking for their favorite apostle 
Judas Iscariot, without whom the salvation of the 
world would not have been effected^ and under whose 
name they composed a Gospel before the end of the 
second century. 

The principal rock on which Gnosticism went to 
destruction was Manicheism. Manes, or Manichaeus, 
was a native of Persia. Upon the old Persian idea of 
two principles, Ormuzd and Ahriman, he developed 
an incoherent and contradictory theory. He pretend- 
ed that he had succeeded in making his system har- 
monize with the most diverse religions. His followers 
admitted as sacred books, besides his own, the New 
Testament and the writings attributed to Zoroaster. 
The advent of Jesus Christ was, according to these 
teachers, a manifestation of the light ; but his birth 
and his death were only apparent. They preached 
metempsychosis, a rigid asceticism, the abolition of 



204 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

property, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy. Like Ma- 
homet, Manes claimed to have ascended to heaven, and 
like Islam, Manicheism, w^hile declaring a belief in 
Jesus Christ, preserved scarcely anything of the Chris- 
tian religion. This doctrine spread with great rapid- 
ity. It invaded successively Asia, Egypt, Italy, Rome, 
and the south of Gaul. A Manichean sect, which 
called its members Cathari (pure, or Puritans), flour- 
ished for a long time in a portion of Eurooe, and espe- 
cially in Southern France ; but their opinions were 
gradually modified, approximating by degrees those 
which were afterwards professed by the Vaudois, with 
whom they are wrongly confounded. From the name 
of the city of Albi they were called Albigenses ; and 
it is well known, that in order to extirpate this inof- 
fensive sect, an atrocious crusade was waged on 
Christian and French soil. 

It would be unjust to include all Gnostic sects, and 
even all those which were attached to Manicheism, in 
a common reprobation. But it is a fact, that in many 
of them one seeks in vain for the essential elements of 
Christianity as we have recognized them, namely, 
aspiration after the reign of God, love to God and 
men, pardon, and the life of the Spirit. Among other 
Gnostics, on the contrary, these great Christian princi- 
ples had been preserved, even in the midst of strange 
reveries. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 205 

The Gnostics have been ingeniously represented as 
forming at this epoch the extreme left of Christendom. 
At their side, but nearer the centre, have been placed 
the Alexandrine or Greek theologians. The centre is 
occupied by a moderate tendency, at an equal distance 
from a bold spiritualism and a narrow^ realism. This 
latter character is that of the Latin Fathers ; whilst on 
the extreme right are found the last remains of Judaiz- 
ing Christianity. In other words, it has been said, if 
the gospel is in the centre, tradition is on the right, 
philosophy on the left ; law on the extreme right, and 
Gnosticism on the opposite extreme. 

It is superfluous to add that such a general coup 
d'ceil cannot be rigorously exact. 

III. 

We have, however, already recognized, as well 
founded, the distinction between the two theologies of 
East and West ; one using the Greek language, spring- 
ing from St. John, and allying itself to Gnosticism ; 
the other speaking Latin, and continuing the compro- 
mise of St. Peter and the work of the Roman spirit 
in the church. The latter resisted the Gnostic ten- 
dency with all its might. Its adherents are seen to be 
constantly preoccupied with this feeling, which, in the 
midst of the quarrels of Qiiietism, caused a celebrated 
woman to ask that her religion might be a little 



2o6 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

thickened. The practical sense of the Romans could 
not be resigned to the vague incoherencies of the 
Gnostic contemplations. Besides, the church had 
much to do in defending itself against this multitude 
of assailants, so various and so impalpable. In order 
to refute their common enemy it was necessary for the 
members to recognize each other, to lay a firm basis 
in the midst of the ebb and flow of systems and 
objections. Thus was formed the Catholic doctrine 
in the church of the West. 

This w^as the origin of the Symbol called the 
Apostles'. The word symbol meant at that time a 
mark by which one caused himself to be recognized 
by his own. It was at the moment of baptism and 
of admission into the church that this symbol was 
required. We have seen that while the apostles 
had contented themselves with saying to candidates, 
'*''Do you believe on the Lord yesus Christ P^^ their 
immediate successors, and they themselves perhaps, 
employed on other occasions, as a formula of baptism, 
these words of Jesus : '-^ Teach all nations^ baptizifig 
them in the name of the Father ,^ and of the Son^ and 
of the Holy Ghost J^ It was enough, in order to 
obtain baptism, that a declaration should be made of 
belief in God, in Christ, and in the Spirit. But the 
church did not limit itself to this simple requirement 
when it wished to exclude the Gnostics, or merely to 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 20^ 

give precision to its own doctrine in order to refute 
theirs. This is why, from the middle of the second 
century to the beginning of the fifth, the symbol was 
developed and extended. Many additions were made 
to it, some of which were welcomed by the public, 
while others found little favor ; an,d thus was formed, 
piece by piece, the actual Creed, It was to refute the 
absurd idea that the world had been made by the 
Demiurgus — an inferior and malevolent -^on — that 
to the simple statement, ^'' I believe in God^^ were added 
these words : '•'-the JFather Ahnighty^ Maker of heaven 
and earth J' It was to attest that the birth of Jesus, 
his sufferings, his death, had not been vain appear- 
ances ; that the words which insist upon these different 
points were intercalated in the Symbol. As to his 
death, this fact was so strongly denied by the Gnos- 
tics that it was believed it could not be too strongly 
affirmed ; thus it was declared, four or five times in 
succession, in saying, ''''He suffered under Pontiles 
Pilate^ was crucified^ dead^ and buried: He de- 
scended iitto Hell; " that is, into Sheol^ the subterra- 
nean abode in which, according to the Jews, all the 
dead were awaiting the resurrection. 

The third part of the Symbol, "/ believe in the 
Holy Ghost^' has remained without development, 
because the theologians of the time had no need to 
defend this point, which no one thought of attacking. 



2o8 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

It was in the same feeling that, during the third 
century, the following words were introduced into the 
symbol : ^^ I believe in the holy Cat Jiolic [or universal^ 
churchy the com7nu7zion of saints^ the forgive7iess of 
sins^' &c. Whatever Protestant theologians may say, 
it is indeed in a wholly Catholic sense that these addi- 
tions were framed, the first of which proclaims the 
unity of the visible church, to the exclusion of here- 
tics ; the second signifies that this church is in com- 
munion with the saints, and counts upon their inter- 
cession ; and the third attributes to the church the 
power to pardon sins. Accordingly, no Protestant 
can repeat this Symbol without giving, wittingly or 
unwittingly, a very different sense to certain parts of it 
from that which the successive authors of this docu- 
ment contemplated. The same may be said of the 
Catholics themselves ; for the reveries of the pseudo- 
Gospel of Nicodemus, on the descent of Jesus into hell, 
have never been imposed upon faith by the Roman 
church, although the Symbol recalls them : so indefi- 
nite is the boundary between what is of faith and 
what is not! The most offensive feature of the 
symbol is, perhaps, its omissions ; this pretended 
resume of Christianity passes in silence the love of 
God and the love of men, the reign of God, repent- 
ance, and the new life. 

Besides, this Symbol by no means possesses the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



209 



authority which some persons have wished to accord 
to it. It has nothing apostolic in its history, and its 
title is false. It has never been adopted, as is claimed, 
by the totality of the churches ; it never will be ; and 
it will necessarily fall into disuse in proportion as its 
origin shall be better known.* 

IV. 

The Latin Fathers are those who wrote in Italy, in 
Gaul, and in the western part of Roman Africa, 
which corresponded nearly to our Algiers, whilst 
Egypt, Alexandria, Greece, were the seat of a great 
Greek or Oriental movement. 

The zeal of the Latin Fathers for the positive side 
of religion often led them astray. Thus St. Ireneeus, 
bishop of Lyons, who wrote against the idealistic 
heresies of his time, inclined so much to a contrary 
sense that he fell into a materialistic Christianity very 
singular and very heterodox. 

* The reader may consult with profit, on the Symbol of the 
Apostles, the important articles of Michel Nicolas, in the 
Revue Germanique for January, 1865, and the subsequent 
numbers ; the article of M. Kayser, in the Revue de Theologie 
de Strasbourg^ x. 153; an Etude historique sur le Symbole 
des Apotres, by M. B. Grawitz (Montpellier, 1864) ; a Rapport 
presented to a pastoral Conference, by M. le Pasteur Viguie 
(Nimes, 1864) ; and an Etude sur la Forination du Symbole^ 
by M. le Pasteur Bonnefon (Montauban, 1858). 



2IO FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

As we have not space to mention all the important 
names in the series of Latin Fathers, we shall select 
two as examples. We shall find in them eminently 
practical spirits, positive, domineering, often narrow 
and violent. 

Tertullian, born at Carthage, had lived a licentious 
youth ; when he embraced Christianity, it was w^ith a 
sort of transport and gloomy passion. Finding the 
church still too relax, he joined the very strict sect of 
Montanists. Fierce and hard in his austerity, he fre- 
quently surpassed all the bounds of equity and good 
sense. But his writings, and especially his Apologies 
for Christianity, from which Bossuet often drew, are 
full of eloquence and force. Guez de Balzac said of 
him, that in reading his works he often thought to see 
that black light of which the poet speaks. 

Cyprian became his most ardent disciple. Born a 
pagan, and very rich, he had passed his first years in 
debauchery. Having become a Christian, he surpassed 
in asceticism him whom he called master. While 
scarcely a catechumen, he thought it his duty to sepa- 
rate from his wife, and then sold his possessions, 
which were very considerable, and gave them to the 
poor. Afterwards he became, contrary to his wishes, 
Bishop of Carthage, and showed himself a decided 
partisan of the idea and the exercise of authority in 
the bosom of the church. He extended the power of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 211 

the Episcopate, imposed a severe discipline upon his 
priests and upon his flock, and maintained with all his 
strength the external unity of the church ; neverthe- 
less, he struggled energetically against the authority 
w^hich the Bishop of Rome began to arrogate to him- 
self over his colleagues. If, as has been said, Cyprian 
was, in some respects, the first of the Catholics, he 
was, at the same time, the ardent enemy of the rising 
papacy. He sufferd martyrdom with great courage. 

Equal to the Latins in austerity, intrepidity, and 
faith, the Greek Fathers are more philosophic, pos- 
sess more knowledge, freedom of mind, largeness of 
heart, and, consequently, less precision of doctrine. 

We shall name here only a few Greek apologists of 
Christianity. The first was a pagan philosopher, who 
became a Christian and died for the faith — St. Justin, 
the Martyr. He believed, like the majority of Chris- 
tians of his time, in the reality of the gods of Olym- 
pus ; but these gods were, in his opinion, demons, to 
whom he attributed the persecutions suffered by the 
church. The author of another Apology for the Chris- 
tian religion, St. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, is 
remarkable only for having invented the word Trinity; 
he belongs to the close of the second century. 

St. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria, is a fine exam- 
ple of the height to which the most distinguished 
Greek Fathers attained. At first a pagan and phi- 



212 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

losopher, like Justin, he was attracted to the gospel 
through his admiration for the virtues of the disciples 
of Christ. With fervent piety and rare learning, he 
taught a Christianity admirable for its liberality. In 
a series of three great v^orks he proved, by a multi- 
tude of citations, the analogies between ancient philos- 
ophy and the Christian religion. He did not admit 
that Christianity could be absolutely new ; on the 
contrary, he demonstrated that pagan philosophy had 
been necessary before the coming of Jesus Christ, and 
that it had not ceased to be useful. 

According to him, the divine Word has in all time 
taught men the truth, and inspired pagan poets, phi- 
losophers, and sibyls. Therefore he denies the damna- 
tion of pagans. Clement was one of those superior and 
generous men whose liberality comes from the heart ; 
one of those deeply believing men who cannot admit 
doctrines the narrowness of which calumniates God 
and devotes humanity to despair. He knew how to 
expose and defend his large and strong Christian con- 
victions without being unjust towards the world or the 
religion he had left. He raised Paul, and, still more, 
Jesus Christ, far above the philosophers, and on many 
points he refuted these sages of the pagan world ; but 
he respected all noble intelligence and all good will. 

Still another personage, worthy of sympathy, is 
Origen, surnamed Adamantius {adamas^ diamond ; 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 213 

hence adamantine^ unconquerable), on account of the 
firmness of his character. He aspired to the highest 
Christian virtues, and carried the love of knowledge 
as far as possible. Author of six thousand writings 
of various extent, he created a new science, long 
neglected, especially in France, but which is now 
beginning to flourish among us — sacred criticism.* 
Origen was seventeen years old when his father suf- 
ered martyrdom ; he wished to die also ; his mother 
succeeded in forcing him to live, but he wrote to his 
father a letter of exhortation full of the loftiest senti- 
ments. At eighteen years of age, during a persecu- 
tion, he dared, and was competent, to replace the 
heads of the church of Alexandria, who had fled. 
Fifty-one years later he died, in consequence of the 
torture which he had endured four years previously, 

* Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, rational bib- 
lical criticism was nowhere more vigorous than in France. 
But the impolitic as well as unjust decree of 1685 ^ot only 
paralyzed all the industrial forces of the country, but also cut 
short a growth of free thought in religious matters, which 
was promising the most fruitful results. For nearly a century 
and a half after this fatal event, France produced nothing wor- 
thy of note in theology, until the thoroughly liberal and scien- 
tific, yet profoundly Christian, movement began, of which 
Colani, Sherer, the Coquerels, Bost, and Reville are the prin- 
cipal representatives. This movement originated chiefly in 
the pulpit, and consequently has a less speculative character 
and a more practical aim than the criticism of Germany, 
which sprang from the professorial chair. — Trans* 



214 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS. 

with invincible courage. He filled this interval of 
half a century by a long succession of persistent 
studies, indefatigable instructions, and powerful strug- 
gles against the paganism, the ignorance, and the 
errors of the time. 

According to him, as according to Jesus, God acts 
unceasingly. He has created the world for intelligent 
beings, but they have not all remained innocent. 
They are to lift themselves up by a gradual perfecting. 
In order to save them, God sent into the world the 
Word^ which is not an emanation, but which has 
been begotten from all eternity. Origen denied the 
reign of a thousand years, or millennium, which Chris- 
tians, as well as Jews, hoped for ; he also denied the 
eternity of punishments. In his treatise On Prayer^ 
he taught that one ought to pray in the name of Jesus, 
but pray to God alone, and not to Jesus. 

Unfortunately Origen started from the principle 
that the Holy Scriptures have three senses, which he 
called the literal sense, the moral sense, and the alle- 
gorical sense. It is comprehensible that with such a 
theory he could in good faith make the Scriptures 
say whatever he wished. 

Origen had very numerous disciples, who often 
exaggerated his opinions. They formed a considera- 
ble school, which was very actively combated, and 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 215 

deserved to be so, because it lost itself in allegory 
and vague theory, becoming more and more foreign to 
the natural sense of things and w^ords. 

There are here lamentable tendencies, vs^hich killed 
not only theology, but also piety and Christian life in 
the Eastern church ; nevertheless, the breadth of the 
best Greek Fathers, such as Origen or Clement of 
Alexandria, is a thousand times superior to the dry 
and harsh narrow^ness of the Latins. The latter ruled 
the church by practical strength, exclusiveness, the 
art of governing, and of encroaching ; the former 
loved and thought. Assuredly we do not claim that 
true Christians ought to lack prudence and the spirit 
of leadership ; but the Catholic church, heir of the 
Roman Senate, show^ed itself far too skilful in disci- 
plining and controlling souls. 

From this point of viev^ we shall presently watch a 
decisive crisis in the destinies of Christendom. The 
Christian religion, which was only a manner of living, 
an exemplification of the true life of consciences spon- 
taneously united to God by faith in Jesus Christ, is 
about to become a manner of subduing men, a means 
of government. Imperial centralization takes posses- 
sion of Christianity in order to change the church into 
an official administration, and what was at first the 
free union of all believers into a formidable clerical 



2l6 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

oligarchy, becoming more and more encroaching and 
oppressive. Thus was effected a transformation more 
radical than all that had preceded it, impressed with 
a wholly different character, and destined to exercise 
on the future of Christianity an immense influence, 
of which the church has not yet seen the end. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 21 7 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE CHRISTIANITY OF CONSTANTINE. 

If we examine attentively all the quarrels, all the persecu- 
tions, all the religious massacres, which followed the conversion 
of Constantine, we shall see that all these so grievous things 
took their birth in the efforts of some men to give to the new 
religion a dogmatic form. — Benjamin Constant, De la Re- 
Itgion, I. 2. No. i8. 

I. 

FROM the beginning of the fourth century, Chris- 
tianity had become a power in the social and 
political world, less by its rapid propagation and the 
always increasing number of its adherents, than by 
the captivating force which belongs naturally to 
every truth for v/hich the human mind is ripe. Suc- 
cessive Emperors and Caesars had relied, some upon 
the still existing polytheism, others upan the new 
religion, which was filling the world with its sec- 
taries. At different times, under Commodus, Helio- 
gabalus, and Alexander Severus, Christianit}' had 
enjoyed some degree of favor and repute at court. 
One Caesar, Constantius Chlorus, an eclectic and 



2l8 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

prudent mind, had often shown himself friendly to 
the Christians, without, however, joining himself to 
them. Constantine, his son, was great by ambition, 
and became a skilful politician. He made use of the 
Christians in ridding himself of the princes who 
shared with him the empire of the world ; but if he 
succeeded in his selfish work of unification, it was 
principally by fortunate wars and a long series of 
domestic assassinations. 

Having become Christian and sole emperor, this 
man, who remained all his life sovereign pontiff of 
the pagans, and who had not even received baptism, 
wished to be, and was, head of the church — real 
pope : he declared himself bishop of things without; 
but never did pope regulate more directly things with- 
in, and decide with greater boldness and authority 
interior questions, and even dogmatic controversies. 
He performed all the functions of a pope ; he institut- 
ed and deposed bishops ; he even convoked oecumen- 
ical councils. He loved to preach, and often delivered 
sermons carefully prepared. Although he remained 
for a long time orthodox, he finally inclined strongly 
to Arianism ; and when he caused himself to be bap- 
tized, shortly before his death, it was by an Arian 
bishop.* But, ordiodox or not, this adroit despot 

* The baptism was thus deferred because a material and 
absolute efficacy was attributed to this sacrament; it was 



OF CHRISTIANITY-. 



219 



succeeded in bringing both the church and the world 
under the supreme law of his good pleasure. And 
for both, his conversion produced happy as well as 
deplorable results, although these latter have had more 
intensity and duration than the former. 

It would be equally a mistake either to den}; the 
sincerity of Constantine's conversion, or to attempt to 
recognize in him a conscientious and devoted Christian. 
He believed in Christian truth as in a powerful reality, 
a very considerable element of success and of domin- 
ion. The world followed his example : for a long 
time it had been common for emperors of foreign 
birth, and coming from some remote province, to bring 
into vogue the divinity and the worship which they 
happened to prefer. Their court and subjects will- 
ingly accommodated themselves to the religion of the 
head of the state, especially if it contained the charm 
of novelty, always dear to debauched and satiated 
men. When the emperor declared himself a Chris- 
tian, a multitude of persons thought it a very simple 

imagined that a man who should die without having sinned 
after baptism, would be admitted straight to celestial happi- 
ness. This puerile calculation, which proves to what extent 
Christianity had already become materialized, was not rare at 
this era. It was, however, soon renounced, since by reason of 
delaying baptism many persons died without having received 
it, and the fear of damnation caused the great majority to 
fall from this extreme into an opposite one, — the baptism of 
infants, — which had already become quite frequent. 



220 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

matter to be converted, without scrutinizing too closely 
a worship which was that of the head of the state.* 

While the world submitted without repugnance and 
often with a sincere religious enthusiasm, the church 
considered that it had gained a victory. The clergy 
especially were loaded with favors. Constantine be- 
stowed upon the church the right of acquiring prop- 
erty (^jus acquirendz)^ and early enriched it with 
confiscations from Jews, pagans, and heretics. He 
exempted Christian ministers from the greater part of 
imposts and corvees^ as well as from municipal bur- 
dens. From this favor resulted a strange abuse ; a 
multitude of rich men became priests in order to be 
exempted from tax-paying : thus the product of im- 
posts and corvees was diminished, and the emperor 
knew of no other way to remedy the evil except by 
interdicting the priesthood, by a sovereign arbitrary 
decree, to every man rich enough to be decurzon. 
To these privileges of the clergy were soon added 
exemption from torture, from oaths, from testifying ; 
and the bishop became the judge in all cases of an 
ecclesiastical nature. The councils were not slow in 
giving to churches the right of asylum which the 
pagan temples had possessed hitherto. It is easy to 
comprehend how much the moral and religious plane 

* Montesquieu, Grandeurs et Decadence des Romains^ ch. 
xvi. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 221 



of the clergy was necessarily lowered by such pre- 



rogatives. 



Nevertheless, a considerable amelioration took place 
in the laws ; Roman jurisprudence was revised from 
a Christian point of view, as it was then understood, 
and received important modifications and mitigations, 
by which women, children, slaves, and accused per- 
sons were especially benefited. The combats of 
gladiators were forbidden ; and if they did not imme- 
diately cease, at least public morals became more and 
more averse to the barbaric sports of the arena, in 
wdiich suffering and death were the amusement of a 
bloodthirsty multitude. 

But while the civil law was mollified in these re- 
spects, it became more rigorous against whatever was 
not orthodox — against pagans, Jews, and especially 
heretics. Still the penalty of death was not pro- 
nounced as a punishment for heresy, except by Theo- 
dosius in 382, and was applied for the first time in 
3S7, by Maxentius, to Priscillian, whose name should 
be honored as that of the first martyr of orthodox 
intolerance. 

This detestable innovation, radically contrary to the 
spirit of Christianity, and constituting the most mon- 
strous of anomalies in a religion founded by the 
crucified Christ, was condemned by some of the 
noblest heads of the church, by four illustrious 



222 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

bishops, whom Rome has canonized — Martin of 
Tours, Ambrose, Augustine, and Chrysostom ; but 
it was approved by two other saints, who represent 
more fully the inexorable and inhuman side of Catho- 
lic orthodoxy, St. Jerome and the pope St. Leo the 
Great. 

The political organization of the empire became the 
model of that of the church ; the majority of the 
administrative divisions of the state were applied to 
Christendom. The Bishops of Rome, of Constanti- 
nople, of Alexandria, of Antioch, and of Jerusalem 
were Zdi^X^di ^aU'iarchs^ and sometimes exarchs. Be- 
neath them were placed metropolitan bishops, whose 
residence was ordinarily the chief town of the prov- 
ince, or some city famous in the history of Chris- 
tianity, in consideration, for example, of having had 
one of the apostles as bishop. Rome, as yet, ruled 
over only the provinces called suburbicarian ; but by 
the mere fact of the establishment of the seat of em- 
pire at Byzantium, Constantine made of the Roman 
patriarch the most important personage of the Eternal 
City. Now, the prestige of Rome was so great that 
the man who was first in the old capital of the world 
could find it comparatively easy to establish his su- 
premacy elsewhere. It must not be forgotten that the 
East had four patriarchs, and the West only one: 
every time that the empire was divided, the Western 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 223 

world found that it had at its head an emperor for 
temporal, and a pope for spiritual affairs, while the 
East had four equal patriarchs, much inferior in im- 
portance to the sovereign. The title of pope, meaning 
father, was often given to bishops, and only gradually 
became the monopoly of those of Rome. 

Already had Leo the Great dared to style himself 
bishop of all the churches^ as successor of the apostles 
Peter and Paul ; but we must not suppose that such 
pretensions were accepted without objection ; the 
Bisho2^s of Milan, Aquileia, Ravenna, and especially 
those of Africa, protested against the prerogatives 
which the see of Rome arrogated to itself, and de- 
clared themselves independent. We have seen St. 
Cyprian defend with energy the rights of the episco- 
pate against the rising papacy. A council assembled 
at Hippona decreed that the Bishop of Rome is in no 
sense the prince of the priests, and that he is only the 
bishop of the first among all the episcopal sees {epis- 
copus p7'i7nce sedis) ; but Leo the Great obtained from 
Valentinian III. an edict which declared the Bishop 
of Rome head of the bishops of the West and their 
supreme judge, even putting the imperial police at his 
disposal, if their force should be necessary to constrain 
his colleagues of the West to appear before him. 

Leo failed, however, in attempting to extend his 
powers over the East, where another emperor reigned 



224 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

and where other patriarchs held jurisdiction. He 
failed, too, when he endeavored to prevail upon the 
Council of Chalcedonia to annul the supremacy which 
the Patriarch of Constantinople had assumed over the 
whole East, as Leo himself had done over the West- 
ern empire. 

Thus the power of the popes increased, without 
ever succeeding in becoming universal. 

II. 

It was impossible that Christianity should sink so 
low as to become a state and court religion, retaining 
at the head of its clergy ambitious men, whose lives 
were a scandal through their luxury and voluptuous- 
ness, without causing an energetic reaction which 
should protest against these abuses in the name of 
Christian austerity. Unfortunately, as it always hap- 
pens, the reaction equalled in exaggeration the disor- 
der which it condemned. To a worldly and imperial 
religion was offered, in contrast, a religion hostile to 
society, alien to the family — the religion of the monks. 

A rich young man of Heraclea, named Anthony, 
following the example of John the Baptist and the 
innumerable hermits who had never been wanting 
to Oriental religions, gave all his possessions to the 
poor, and went to live in the desert in idleness and 
maceration. Pursued like the majority of anchorites, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 225 

sometimes by erotic visions, sometimes by the vain 
terrors whicli solitude engenders, he redoubled his 
austerities without succeeding in triumphing over his 
imagination, or, as he very sincerely called it, the 
devil. He soon had a throng of admirers and pas- 
sionate imitators. 

Thebais became peopled with hermits ; at different 
times Anthony was obliged to flee farther away in 
order to escape from the multitude, who regarded 
him as a saint. He was venerated, and even con- 
sulted by Constantine, and by his sons, and, what 
is perhaps more astonishing, by the haughty Patri- 
arch of Alexandria, St. Athanasius. Pachomius, 
Martin of Tours, Cassianus, Benedict, created con- 
vents and regulated the common life of their monks. 
Thus was effected one of the most fatal degen- 
eracies which Christianity has undergone. The ideal 
of Christian holiness retrograded from Jesus Christ 
to John the Baptist, and to the prophet Elias, the 
hermit of Carmel, the pretended founder of the Car- 
melite friars and nuns. A morbid and monachal 
tendency, propagated by a multitude of anchorites 
and cenobites, continued to spread from hermitages 
and convents into the church and the world. Absti- 
nences which were useless, and even injurious to 
morals, were elevated into virtues. Solitude was con- 
sidered more holy than the family ; idleness, so sweet 

15 



226 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

under the sun of Africa, seemed more meritorious than 
labor ; celibacy more sacred than the self-denial of 
father and mother for their children ; egoistic anxiety 
for individual salvation w^as substituted for the active 
charity which Jesus had exemplified by living among 
men and dying for them. From that period there 
existed in the very bosom of Christianity two different 
standards of morality. A true Christian, a father of a 
family, a devoted and useful member of society, a 
pious and irreproachable mother, were thenceforth 
only inferior types of morality and of holiness ; while 
the monk, the consecrated virgin, usurped the first 
rank. 

There has scarcely ever existed a human institution 
of which it would be just to speak only evil. The 
most detestable of all — slavery — was, at the time of 
its establishment, a progress : evidently it was more 
humane to reduce prisoners to captivity than to 
butcher them. We do not deny that the monastic 
orders have been useful in certain semi-barbarous 
epochs : some of these corporations have rendered 
real service either as charitable associations, or, more 
rarely, as learned societies. There are, in ecclesiasti- 
cal history, some splendid figures of monks ; and sev- 
eral creators or reformers of orders have been great 
men. But neither an order, nor a convent, nor a monk, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 227 

nor all together, have ever done as much good as 
the mere existence of monachism has done evil to the 
human race. It is an immense error, and a dangerous 
weakness, to allow one's self to be so blinded by the 
charitable acts of this or that congregation of men or 
women, as to fail to perceive the enormous evil which 
has been done to the church and the world by the dis- 
cipline of the convent and the monastic spirit.* 

The influence of this spirit upon the church was 
very great. Celibacy was soon held in high honor. 
Married priests, finding themselves less respected than 
were the monks, gradually submitted to this law, 
which became a fruitful source of errors and disorders 
for the church. The Council of Nice was on the point 
of interdicting marriage to the clergy, when an old 
monk named Paphnutius restrained his colleagues on 
the fatal declivity of asceticism. Experience of life 
and the Christian sense were strong enough in him to 
prevent this dangerous resolution : but he could do 

* This is equivalent to saying that in our eyes the introduc- 
tion of analogous institutions into the bosom of Protestant- 
ism is an humiliating and a fatal degeneracy. The old Hugue- 
not spirit would never have consented to it; and that spirit 
was sound. Besides, the lay school of nurses and the sublime 
work of Florence Nightingale prove conclusively that nothing 
is gained for true beneficence by being enrolled in the ranks 
of a monachal corporation, while much is lost forreligion and 
society. 



228 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

nothing more than to delay its introduction. The law 
of ecclesiastic celibacy was published for the first time 
in 386, and was long in becoming general in the 
West : it never became so in the East. But the 
Christian clergy had already become an active army, 
disciplined and commanded by chiefs as skilful as 
they were ambitious. Now, the interest of every mas- 
ter of militia will always be to withdraw his soldiers 
from family ties and the duties of civil life, in order 
to make of them docile and absolutely devoted tools : 
thus the papacy succeeded, after a prolonged struggle, 
in interdicting marriage to the priests. She Vv^as wise ; 
for from the day when the ministers of the Catholic 
worship should become fathers of families, citizens 
bound to society and to their country, either through 
their own marriage or from the necessities of their 
children's career, Roman absolutism would have 
ceased to be. 

The question had already become a very grave one, 
since the clergy increased rapidly in numbers and in 
influence. In the year 251, according to a letter of 
Cornelius, Bishop of Rome, cited by Eusebius, the 
church of Rome possessed forty-six officiating priests, 
and assisted at least fifteen hundred poor. Under 
Constantine, these figures, already high, increased 
excessively. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 229 



III. 



As soon as -the pagans began to be converted, the 
church, which, under the inspiration of St. Peter, had 
weakly allowed the exacting demands of the Judaical 
spirit, yielded likewise, as we have seen, to the pres- 
sure of pagan customs. 

Thus had been constituted, to the great detriment 
of the Christian spirituality and evangelical liberty, so 
emphatically praised by St. Paul, that Roman Chris- 
tianity which by degrees became Catholicism. It is 
easy to comprehend that this movement was power- 
fully increased and accelerated by the conversion of 
the emperor and the empire, and by the fall of Chris- 
tianity to the rank of a state religion. We shall now 
briefly describe the principal developments of this 
melancholy progress. 

The worship of saints took rapid extension in pro- 
portion as persecution multiplied the martyrs, and as 
each city, each locality, great or small, substituted a 
Christian patron for the tutelar god of former times. 
An ecclesiastical historian, Eusebius, Bishop of Cassa- 
rea, thought to justify the worship of saints by quoting 
a pagan philosopher, Plato, and wdiat is still more 
curious, a poet — the very author of the Theogony, 
— Hesiod. The prayers which the church was still 
addressing to God for the saints fell into disuse, and 



230 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

remained in practice only among a few heretical 
sects.* 

The anniversary of the death of the martyrs was 
made a feast day ; the veneration due to those who 
had given their lives for religion increased the esti- 
mate of relics, and the Christian adoration of the 
ashes of martyrs exceeded the pagan apotheosis of 
emperors and heroes. On account of this supersti- 
tion the idolaters bestowed upon the disciples of 
Christ the disparaging surname of Cineraries. 

In the fourth century sacred images rose in popular 
favor. Painting was regarded as a means of instrilc- 
tion. In order to popularize the Old and New Testa- 
ments among the new Christians, their principal events 
and most remarkable personages were represented on 
the arches and walls of temples, either by encaustic 
paintings or by mosaics. When art fell into deca- 
dence, its last efforts, more and more rude and unskil- 
ful, were employed in the decoration of churches, 

* We know, however, that, through forgetfulness, the Roman 
church left in the canon of the mass a prayer which still forms a 
part of its service, but which is not in harmony with the 
more recent doctrine of purgatory, and wherein salvation is 
implored for the saints, which, being more than certain, ought 
never to have been asked. In reality this prayer is a last echo 
of the old Jewish dogma of Sheol, or the sleep of souls. See 
Canon Missce apud Gab, Biel. p. 78. This article of the 
Canon gave rise to lengthy debates between the Cardinal of 
Perron, the pastor of Moulin, and others. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 1 

especially in the East. Byzantine architecture and 
painting were perpetuated during the middle ages, 
to the moment when the taking of Constantinople 
obliged mosaic masters, painters, and architects to 
take refuge in Greece and Italy, where they formed 
a school void of originality, but which served as a 
point of departure for the Western Christian art of 
the middle ages and of the Renaissance. Sculpture 
was introduced into the cultus much later than 
painting, because it was prohibited by the Decalogue 
in express terms, and because the Ten Command- 
ments, like the whole Mosaic law, were imposed 
literally by orthodoxy upon Christians as well as 
upon Jews. We must not suppose that painting itself 
was received into the church without protest. Euse- 
bius refused an image to the sister of Constantine ; 
another celebrated bishop, Epiphanius, tore in pieces 
a canvas upon which had been painted the face of a 
saint. 

In the capitals and great cities the churches became 
magnificent. Ordinarily, they contained, in a sanc- 
tuary closed by a grate and a curtain, two pulpits, 
called amboncs^ destined one for the reading of the 
Gospels, the other for the reading of the Epistles. 
These pulpits were ver}^ luxuriously decorated, espe- 
cially with mosaics and costly marbles, to which were 



232 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSF'ORMATIONS 

subsequently added forms of animals.* When the 
idea of sacrifice and the assimilation of the Lord's 
Supper to Jewish and pagan rites had come into favor, 
the Word became less important in the worship than 
symbolical acts, and the reading of the sacred books 
ended by being only an accessory of the sacrifice. 
Thus the altar increased in importance, and received 
new ornamentation, w^hile the two pulpits were made 
more plain, and were finally reduced to one. There 
remain to-day of the custom which placed the a7nbones 
on the right and on the left of the sacred table only 
the names. The Gospel side and the Epistle side are 
terms still used to designate the right and the left of 
the altar. 

In the churches, distinct places were assigned to 
the emperor and his court, to the bishop and his 
clergy, to monks, women, and young girls. From the 
fourth to the sixth century the custom obtained of 
building in front of the principal church a baptistery — 
a small circular temple, with a large font in the 
centre. These are still to be seen in various cities 
of Italy, such as Rome, Pisa, Florence, Parma, and 
Ravenna. The latter city has two, one of which was 

* Several churches, like that of San Clemente, and the 
Basilica of San Lorenzo at Rome, or the Cathedral of Ravello, 
near Salerno, still retain some vestiges of these primitive 
arrangements. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 333 

built by the orthodox and the other by the Arians. 
It was in this special sanctuary that new members of 
the church were baptized, especially on Easter Eve. 

The precise time of the Christian passover, for 
which St. John furnishes a datum absolutely irrecon- 
cilable with that of the other three Evangelists, was 
the subject of long and keen disputes in Christendom. 
Constantine in vain endeavored to settle the question 
with the aid of Hosius, Bishop of Cordova. The 
Councils of Nice and of Laodicea decided it. Pope 
Liberius established the festival of Christmas at the 
date of the Saturnalia and the feasts of Mithras ; that 
is, at the winter solstice. Another pope, Gelasius, 
substituted for the scandalous Lupercalia of the pagans 
the feast of the purification of Mary. It is quite com- 
prehensible, without being necessary to insist upon it, 
why Christian feasts were thus contrived to replace 
the accustomed solemnities of the pagan year. But 
the substitutions themselves were a frequent cause of 
lamentable abuses and complications. The compul- 
sory observance of holidays was extended to the 
weekly feast of the Christians. Constantine forbade 
all labor on Sunday, except that of the harvest, which 
it was considered impossible to defer, and the act by 
which a slave was emancipated, which was very justly 
regarded as eminently Christian, and agreeable to God. 

We have spoken of Mary : the honors which had as 



234 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

yet scarcely begun to be rendered to her steadily in- 
creased. In their zeal for celibacy, some of the Fathers 
of the fourth century asserted that Mary had always 
remained a virgin, in spite of the testimony of the 
four Evangelists, who give the names of Jesus' broth- 
ers, and make mention of his sisters. 

Gradually the same homage came to be bestowed 
upon the mother of Christ as the pagan world had 
been accustomed to offer to certain goddesses. Thus 
was dedicated to her a particular kind of cakes, which 
had hitherto been concecrated to Cybele — a custom 
which Epiphanius, the Bishop of Antioch, severely 
censured. In general, the first Fathers were very 
little inclined to the exaggerated veneration for Mary 
manifested by the following centuries. St. Irenseus 
accuses her of having shown undue hastiness {intejn- 
pestiva7n jfestmationem) on the occasion when Jesus 
said to her, " Woman^ what have I to do with theeP'^ 
Tertullian affirms that Mary (like her four younger 
sons) was still incredulous after the time when the 
sisters of Lazarus were converted. It w\is in 431, at 
the Council of Ephesus, that she was declared mother 
of God, in order to refute Nestorius, who had taught 
the separation of the two natures in Christ, maintain- 
ing that Mary was the mother of the Christ-man, but 
not of the ,Christ-God. The condemnation of Nesto- 
rius was the signal for the creation of those innumer- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 235 

able images which, in all Catholic countries, represent 
the Virgin and Child. These images were placed 
everywhere, as protests against the condemned here- 
siarch, and as pledges of orthodoxy. It has been 
observed that St. Cyril, who was very influential in 
bringing about this result, had passed the greater part 
of his life in Egypt, where he had become accustomed 
to the numerous representations of the goddess Isis, 
nursing: or holdins: in her arms her son Horus. As 
soon as Mary had received the title of Mother of God, 
— a blasphemy which would have revolted the primi- 
tive Christians — she could not fail to become herself a 
divinity. Her honor constantly increased. The fii- 
mous Narses was one of the first to distinguish him- 
self in adoring her : she naturally became very pop- 
ular with the converted pagans, and among them 
she inherited a name of praise long borne by Vesta, 
by Rhea, and especially by Ops or Cybele, that 
of bona dea — good goddess. 

While preaching lost, in the West, a great share of 
its importance, it was more popular in the East, and 
continued for a long time to constitute a considerable 
part of the worship. The laity and the monks did not 
preach. Although Constantine frequently did so, it 
was because he arrogated to himself, as his pretended 
successors, the Czars of Russia, still do, rights very 
analogous to those of the pontificate. The people. 



236 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

according to the custom which still prevails in the 
Greek church, listened to the sermon standing — a 
circumstance which rendered the assemblies noisy and 
restless. The auditory often applauded the preachers, 
and thereby stimulated among them rivalries far too 
worldly in their nature and effect. The preaching of 
Arius, a simple priest, was received with much more 
eclat in Alexandria than that of his bishop, the Patri- 
arch Alexander. Thereupon Alexander opposed to him 
Athanasius, who was still a mere deacon, although cus- 
tom limited the duties of preaching mainly to the priests. 

The communion was given to all baptized persons, 
even to children. The bishop, standing by the altar, 
distributed the bread, which in the East was leavened, 
but in the West unleavened ; afterwards a deacon 
gave the cup to all the communicants. The real pres- 
ence of Jesus in the host was not imagined till much 
later. St. Athanasius admitted into the bread and 
wine only the spiritual presence of Jesus, as did 
Calvin afterwards : St. Augustine, like the majority 
of Protestants, simply calls the bread and wine signs. 
Nevertheless, the Lord's Supper was represented to 
the pagans more and more as one of those expiatory 
sacrifices to which they had been accustomed ; and 
from this point of view began the communion for the 
dead. 

Baptism took place by immersion, and the neophyte 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 237 

was plunged into the water three times ; for the sick, 
however, it was considered sufficient to sprinkle with 
a few drops of water. For the nuptial ceremony the 
church adopted the majority of pagan usages, such as 
two crowns, two rings, and the veil. 

Pilgrimages suddenly took a prodigious extension 
after St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, had 
visited the Holy Land, loading with rich donations 
the priests or the monks who pointed out to her the 
locality of the various scenes of the gospel, or who 
presented to her relics of great price. They found 
everything that she desired to see or to possess — 
Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, the wood and nails of 
the true cross, as well as a multitude of sacred objects 
and places equally apocryphal. The best minds pro- 
tested in vain against the infatuation of pilgrimages 
and the wholly material sanctity which was attributed 
to those pious excursions : such were St. Augustine, 
St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and, what 
is more significant, St. Jerome himself. 

Indeed, it must not be supposed that so many 
changes could be introduced into the religion of Jesus 
Christ, materializing it in so many ways, without 
exciting energetic protests.* Faustus, Novatus, Euno- 

* See Protestations faites an IV^ Steele contre les Bifiltra- 
tions paiennes dans le Culte ChHtien^ by Ed. Rabaud. Stras- 
bourg, 1862. 



238 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

mlus, Arius, and many others, reproached the Chris- 
tians with their worship of martyrs, relics, and images. 
Vigilantius, a pri'est of Barcelona, born near Toulouse 
about the year 360, is the first known organ of this 
unconquerable opposition to Catholicism, which it 
has always been impossible to suppress in the zone 
extending from the Pyrenees to the Alps through 
the Cevennes, although the Inquisition, the fraterni- 
ties of Penitents, and many bloody crusades in Chris- 
tian countries have been invented for this express 
purpose. Vigilantius condemned the worship of rel- 
ics and of saints, the use of candles, vigils, alms for 
Jerusalem. St. Jerome replied to him by waitings 
filled with insults, violence, and bad faith, in which 
he even goes so far as to call his opponent a monster. 
The church, in fact, gave a cold reception to those 
who tried to reestablish primitive simplicity in its 
bosom. All the reformers, down to the sixteenth cen- 
tury, were strangers to the dominant preoccupation 
of the church and its heads. The latter, especially 
after Constantine, thought far less of the truth of doc- 
trines and of holiness of life, than of the supreme 
interest of the Propaganda. It seemed much more 
important to increase the number of Christians than 
to strengthen their faith or their virtue ; and every 
plan by which the pagans could be attracted en masse 
was regarded as at least innocent, if not meritorious 
and necessary. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 239 

IV. 

Of all the forms of resistance which the ecclesi- 
astical movement under Constantine encountered, the 
most important, doubtless, was that of Arius. As we 
are not able to give in these pages even an abridged 
account of all the dogmatic contentions of the epoch, 
we choose this as the most interesting, and the one 
which agitated most deeply the entire church, and 
shall endeavor to present a succinct and yet exact 
sketch of it. 

It was in 318, at Alexandria, that this great conflict 
burst forth between Arius, then a simple deacon, and 
the Patriarch Alexander ; not, as is generally asserted, 
on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ, but on 
his eternity. 

Four points, very grave ones assuredly, were equal- 
ly admitted by the two adversaries. They agreed, 
first, to call Jesus God, and to worship him ; secondly, 
to discriminate between the Father and the Son as 
two different persons or hypostases ; thirdly, to 
declare that the Son had been begotten before all 
things ; fourthly, to regard him as having created the 
world. It would seem from this that all important 
views were common to the two parties ; and it is evi- 
dent that very few modern Christians are as orthodox 
as the heresiarck Arius. The immense majority of 



240 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

tlie actual Orthodox are not even Arians. But there 
were three other points upon which the theologians of 
the fourth century were divided : first, according to 
Alexander, the Son is eternal, like the Father ; other- 
wise, before begetting him, the Father would have been 
without Son — without Word ; Arius affirmed, on 
the contrary, that there was a time when the Son did 
not exist. Secondly, Alexander taught that the Son is 
of the same substance as the Father ; Arius denied 
this,, and declared the Son created out of nothing, like 
the universe. Thirdly, according to Alexander, the 
Son was necessary, which Arius absolutely contested. 

Both of these systems, compared with the doctrines 
then prevailing, were innovations — that of Alexander 
as to the consubstantiality and the necessity of the 
Son ; that of Arius, in calling him created. The word 
consubstantiality had already been condemned as he- 
retical by the Council of Antioch in 269. From the 
point of view^ of that age, neither opinion was ortho- 
dox in fact, and scarcely in tendency. 

Both disputants were inconsequent in a high de- 
gree ; Alexander and the Catholic church in proclaim- 
ing as necessary and eternal a being whom they said 
had been begotten ; Arius, in adoring as God a being 
whom he declared created. 

But the doctrine of Alexander was infinitely more 
popular than that of Arius : it seemed then, as it still 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 24I 

seems to ignorant persons, that he is most pious, most 
Christian, who exalts Jesus highest ; and they do not 
care to know whether or not this exaltation is con- 
trary to the will of Jesus, in opposition to his express 
declarations, and at the expense of the very idea 
of God. 

It must be remembered that Alexander was pa- 
triarch while Arius was, at the beginning of the con- 
test, only a deacon. In 321 Alexander used his 
authority in causing Arius and fifteen other persons 
who shared his doctrine to be condemned and ex- 
communicated by a provincial council at Alexandria. 
Arius then wrote his defence, and sent it to those bish- 
ops who agreed with him, and also set forth his ideas 
in religious hymns and other works. Several bishops, 
and among them Eusebius of Nicomedia declared 
themselves in his favor. Constantine, seeing in all 
this debate only a dispute of words, wrote to the two 
adversaries, and proclaimed that unity should reign in 
the church. It is thus that supreme power generally 
acts when it attempts to interfere with dogmatic ques- 
tions. 

But as the question continued to be argued with in- 
creasing vehemence on both sides, Constantine, in the 
year 325, called, and himself presided over, an oecu- 
menic or General council at Nice, in Bithynia. Arius 
appeared there with twenty bishops. Among the 
16 



242 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

partisans of Alexander was observed one of his dea- 
cons, named Athanasius, of weak bodily presence, 
but powerful in character, and still more so through his 
genius for domination and his spiritual pride. Under 
all the floods of abuse which the two parties addressed 
to each other, it is easy to perceive that at bottom the 
majority of the council, without contending for the 
precise expressions of Arius, was disposed to maintain, 
in accordance with Paul and John, and Jesus himself, 
the subordination of the Son to the Father. It seem.ed 
for a moment that there was to be a mutual under- 
standing. 

But nothing of the sort was attained. In every 
great assembly of this kind there are always some 
narrow and malignant spirits who are not content with 
seeking for the truth, or even with finding it, and 
whose chief aim is to injure their adversaries. This 
contemptible role was played on the occasion referred 
to by the only person who represented the Western 
church at Nice. This was Hosius, Bishop of Cor- 
dova. Seeing that Arius worshipped Christ, calling 
him God and Creator of the world, it was difficult to 
find a formula which should exalt Jesus so high that 
Arius would not be able to accept it ; but it was neces- 
sary to devise such a one in order to bring about his 
condemnation. Hosius took this task upon himself. 
In spite of the prior decision of the Council of An- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 243 

tloch, he proposed to declare that the Son is of one 
substance with the Father. The scruples of many- 
were calmed by explanations contrary to the truth : 
the consent of the emperor was obtained. Three 
hundred bishops signed freely the condemnation of 
Arius ; eleven others yielded to threats of exile, and 
finally signed also ; R\e only remained firm, and were 
banished to Illyria and Gaul ; two others died during 
the session of the council, but it was afterwards 
claimed that their signatures were found, the day 
after the close of the session, miraculously joined to 
those of the living. Constantine was delighted at his 
success, imagining that he had secured the peace of 
the church — the common illusion in such cases, and 
always a mistake. 

Then happened what was easy to foresee : the ad- 
vocates of the subordination of the Son to the Father — 
a doctrine which is clearly taught in the gospel — were 
wounded in their convictions by the new and already 
condemned term of consubstantiality. They were very 
numerous in the church, which at this period gave 
them the name of Semi-Arians. Feeling themselves 
assailed in their faith by the decisions of Nice, they 
united with the Arians against the new orthodoxy. 
From this moment a reaction began, which constantly 
gathered strength, and which after a time gained over 
the emperor himself. 



244 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, although an Arian, 
had not lost favor with the imperial family. Through 
his influence Arius was received at court, where, at the 
request of Constantine, he signed one of those general 
confessions of faith which appear to reestablish peace 
because they carefully avoid touching the point under 
discussion. 

Soon the other Eusebius, Bishop of Nicomedia, and 
one of his colleagues in the bishopric, named Theog- 
nis, were reinstalled in their churches, from which 
they had been exiled ; and by one of those common 
counter-strokes of despotic power, the Bishop of An- 
tioch, who was orthodox, and who disapproved of what 
had taken place, was deposed. This event was the 
cause of a new schism, called the Meletian schism. 

Alexander was now dead, and Athanasius had suc- 
ceeded him. As soon as he became bishop he excom- 
municated Arius. His adversaries, irritated, accused 
him of violence against the Meletians, and even of 
magic. He appeared before a council at Tyre, and 
justified himself completely upon the second charge, 
but not upon the first. Thereupon he was condemned 
and exiled to Treves, whilst Arius was relieved from 
excommunication, and enabled to present to the em- 
peror a satisfactory declaration of principles. The 
triumph of the heresiarch seemed near ; but in the 
night preceding the day on which he was to be 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 245 

solemnly admitted to the Lord's Supper, he suddenly 
died. His friends said that he was poisoned, while 
his enemies claimed that the Patriarch of Constanti- 
nople, who was to give him the communion the next 
day, had, in a prayer, called upon God to decide 
between Arius and his adversaries, and that God had 
replied to him by this death, which was therefore at 
once a divine judgment and a miracle. Constantine 
believed nothing of this, and never again became 
orthodox.* Of his three sons and successors, only 
one, Constantius, was Semi-Arian ; the other tw^o were 
partisans of Athanasius, and recalled him after an 
exile of two years. But it was not long before the 
patriarch was accused of repeated acts of violence, 
which caused his second banishment. He then ap- 
pealed to Julius, Bishop of Rome, who seized eagerly 
the opportunity of exercising a superior authority in 
regard to the two patriarchs hitherto his equals, and 
hastened to restore the title of Bishops of Alexandria 
and of Constantinople to Athanasius and to Paul, who 
had both been deposed. Constantius resented this 
judgment by exiling Paul and appointing his succes- 
sor, thus occasioning at Constantinople frightful dis- 

* As Arius was ah'eadj more that eighty years of age, the 
excitement of the occasion would be sufficient to account for 
his sudden decease, without the interposition of either poison 
or prayer. — Trans, 



246 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

turbances, in which three thousand persons perished. 
The bishops of the East were indignant at the op- 
pression exercised against them. Finding that an 
oecumenical council assembled at Sardica was un- 
favorable to them, they seceded from it, and formed 
another at Philippopolis, whereupon the two assem- 
blies proceeded to load each other with reciprocal 
anathemas. It was thought then to restore peace by 
recalling the banished of the two factions. It was in 
this way that Athanasius returned to his church in 
349 ; but, Constantius becoming sole emperor the fol- 
lowing year, victory belonged to the Arians, who 
returned persecutions for persecutions. In the midst 
of a horrible tumult Paul perished by being strangled. 
The Arian confession was then signed by a multitude 
of bishops, including Liberius, Bishop of Rome. 
But he, having afterwards retracted, was driven 
away, and his Arian successor was massacred by 
the people. 

Athanasius, a third time exiled, fled into Ethiopia. 
Orthodoxy was conquered. But in the very dawn of 
their triumph the Arians and Semi-Arians became 
divided, and peace seemed farther removed than ever, 
till the day when the two parties, weary of this long 
war, signed a confession in the Council of Constan- 
tinople, that the Son is equal to the Father, as saith 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



247 



the Scrlphu'e.'^ This was a vague formula, intended 
to satisfy everybody by carefully avoiding the terms 
C07zsiLbsta7itiality and eternity with their contraries — 
a formula all the more whimsical because the Scrip- 
ture nowhere says that the Son is equal to the Father, 
while it declares in many places that he is subordi- 
nated to Him. When Julian the pagan came to the 
throne, he recalled all those who were in exile on 
account of their religion. Athanasius, taught wisdom 
by misfortune, appeared henceforth somewhat less 
intolerant. It was Lucifer of Calaris, an Arian bishop, 
who this time played the old part of his adversary, and 
banished him : f thence resulted a new division, to 

* The original words of this formula of compromise are as 
follows: Tov Ylov o/uoiov tc5 JJaTQl sivav tcutu Ttdvxa (hg al 
dylaL YQacpal layovcnv. — Trans. 

t M. Coquerel is mistaken in speaking of Lucifer as an 
Arian. On the contrary, he was the head of the strict Atha- 
nasian party. It was he who refused to acknowledge Meletius 
as Bishop of Antioch, because he had been chosen by the 
Arian faction, and who arbitrarily ordained the presbyter 
Paulinus as counter-bishop. He went so far as to protest 
against any recognition of even those Arians and Semi-Arians 
who had renounced their errors. Thus in doctrine, as well as 
in the spirit of intolerance, Lucifer was the legitimate succes- 
sor of Athanasius. At a later period, indeed, he fell out with 
the orthodox, and founded a sect known as Luciferians, which 
entertained view^s of ecclesiastical purity very like those for- 
merly held by the Novatians. In the fifth century this schism 
began to heal, and the Luciferians gradually returned to the 
bosom of the Catholic church. — Trans, 



348 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

which was given the name of Luciferian schism. 
Julian should have declared himself incompetent to 
decide in a dogmatic dispute between Christians. He 
protected the Arians, and the support of one who was 
called the Apostate^ cost them, subsequently, very dear 
in public opinion. Under his reign Athanasius was 
driven away as a disturber for the fourth time. 

The Emperor Jovian was tolerant towards all forms 
of opinion, and recalled for the last time Athanasius, 
who died in 373, after a most agitated career. It was 
a Spanish emperor, Theodosius, who assured the defi- 
nite triumph of Orthodoxy. His edict of 380 recog- 
nizes as sole members of the church those who are in 
communion with the Bishops of Alexandria and Rome. 
The following year, the second CECumenical Council 
of Constantinople confirmed the symbol of Nice. 
Whoever departed from it was punished corporally. 
It is true that Arcadius and Honorius decreed Ortho- 
doxy once more, but it was then already dominant in 
their double empire. And, notwithstanding all this, 
Arianism reappeared with new power. While the 
whole empire was Catholic, all the barbarians con- 
verted to Christianity were Arians or Semi-Arians. 
The Goths carried Arianism into Italy and Spain ; 
the Burgundians into Gaul ; the Suevi into Spain ; 
the Lombards into Italy ; the Vandals into Africa. 
Except these last, all were tolerant towards Catholics. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 249 

The first barbarian chief who became Christian and 
Catholic at the same time was Clovis ; and this fact 
gave to his conversion an importance which has not 
always been understood. By degrees, however, con- 
quered by the more cultivated people whom they had 
vanquished, the barbarians became orthodox. The 
Lombards, who resisted longest, submitted to the 
Catholic church in 672. 

In fine, Arianism was a last illogical and intellec- 
tually timid attempt to maintain God above all, even 
above Christ. It was the last sigh of the old and 
pure Jewish monotheism, stifled by an opposing ten- 
dency, of which Roman polytheism had been the 
universal expression. This pagan tendency, we have 
seen, had invaded the church. It triumphed with 
Athanasius. An idea radically false had prevailed 
equally among the Christians and among their adver- 
saries, and has not yet ceased to prevail among both : 
it is this — that a man is a Christian, not in proportion 
as he believes in the teachings of Jesus and practises 
them, but in proportion as he exalts the person of 
Jesus above all, and makes him equal to the Father. 
This idea, absolutely contrary to the spirit as well as 
to the letter of his doctrine, consists in forgetting, in 
the glorification of his person, the work which he 
wished to glorify and to realize, for which he lived 
and died — the reign of God in the soul. There is still 



250 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

a multitude of Christians sufficiently blind to cling to 
this idea. There is still, outside of Christianity, a 
crowd of unbelievers, born and educated in the bosom 
of Catholicism, who, after the example of Julian, 
accept the same opinion. 

Neither party endeavors to prove what is conform- 
able to the religion of Christ, but only to seek for that 
form of religion which exalts Clirist highest, even in 
opposition to his will and his teaching. Is it not he, 
however, who has said, "iV^/ every oite that saith 
unto jne^ Lord^ Lord^ shall e7tter into the kmg'do7n 
of heaven^ hut he that doeth the will of my Father^ 
which is in heaven ? " * It is true that the church, find- 
ing it more easy to call Jesus God than to follow his 
precepts, is much more rigorous in exacting, of itself 
and of all its members, the first point, than to cause 
the second to prevail. 

V. 

It is j^lain, from the preceding account, that Con- 
stantine was very far from giving to Christendom the 
unity which he had promised. We have, however, 
related only one of the controversies of his time ; how, 
then, would the case appear if we had spoken of the 
Donatists, the Nestorlans, the Eutychians, theMonoph- 
ysites, the Monothelites, the Pelagians, which were 

* Matt. vii. 21. Compare Matt. xix. 17; Mark x. 18. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 251 

SO many notorious schisms, so many powerful divisions, 
turning the church upside down ; so many transfor- 
mations, more or less legitimate, of primitive Chris- 
tianity ; so many great problems stated and solved in 
a thousand ways ? How would it seem, in short, if 
we should here recount the rise of the enormous 
schism which still endures, and which, by separating 
the church of the East from that of the West, limited 
Catholicism — universal as it claims to be — to the 
sole patriarchate of Rome, and united under one 
authority the four others, which the czar claims to 
this day as his legitimate inheritance, and the official 
title of which is Orthodox Church? 

But we have said enough to show how essentially 
the Christianity of Constantine differs from that of 
Christ, and to prove that the first Christian emperor 
opened a broad career for the abuses of power, and, 
by an infallible consequence, to theological subtilties. 
We must dwell for a moment upon this last point. 
The problems which touch the Infinite are at once so 
delicate and so vast, and the individual or collective 
appreciations of them are so varied, that every judge 
who attempts to decide them, whether emperor, czar, 
or pope, council or synod, undertakes an impossible 
task. 

The intervention of power is generally made with 
the intention of pacifying disturbance, and often also 



252 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

in order to establish its own dominion ; but the remedy 
has invariably been found worse than the disease. 
The only way in which authority, of whatever kind, 
can put an end to dogmatic differences, is to impose 
upon everybody an impossible silence. This means 
is a formula which may be able to rally the greatest 
number of adherents ; and yet not only does it neces- 
sarily displease many, and thereby create new dissen- 
tients, but it cuts to the quick all that is most exalting, 
most undulating and diverse^ in the world, and falls 
into inextricable complications, and distinctions more 
and more subtile. The movement impressed by Con- 
stantine never stopped ; the Lower Empire became 
involved in dogmatic controversies increasingly re- 
fined, useless and unintelligible, and they killed it. 
In so far as any one adopts this fatal method of Con- 
stantine, or of any dogmatic authority, he departs 
from Jesus, and from what alone is necessary and 
fundamental in Christianity. In fact, the question 
v^hether a soul is united to God through Christ, and 
whether it labors constantly to become less imperfect, 
cannot be submitted to any human tribunal. The 
interior life is not within the sphere of any judge. 
Now, the Christian life is essentially interior. There 
remain only acts, which rarely offer any hold to the 
judges of the dogma, and words, — that is to say, in 
respect to rehgion, — expressions of doctrine. It is 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 253 

in these that intolerance seeks its prey. Thus Chris- 
tianity, having come out of its natural and legiti- 
mate domain, which is the inner man, — the heart and 
conscience, — is transformed into dry and harsh dog- 
matics, fruitful in serious misapprehensions, inexhaus- 
tible in barren discussions, and in discords as little 
reHgious as fraternal. Every time that the church 
proclaims the unity of its doctrine, thinking thus to 
terminate an anterior sclaism, it inaugurates by that 
act a new schism. This is because unity of opinion 
in matters of the soul is as impracticable as it is 
undesirable. 

God has planted a forest in which each tree has its 
own aspect, its own size, its own peculiar beauty. An 
enemy of disorder endeavors to trim the forest into a 
hedge. Meagre thought ! foolish chimera ! The un- 
happy man will scarcely have died before, in every 
place where his hand has been at work. Nature will 
have resumed her imprescriptive rights, and vegeta- 
tion its luxuriant and varied freedom. The narrow 
uniformity which small minds take for order will have 
disappeared in the magnificent and divine disorder 
of life. 



254 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 



CHAPTER XIII. 
CONCLUSION. 

*' In the course of our researches, one fact has struck us 
forcibly — a fact which has been repeated more than once in 
history. Religions constituted, fashioned, achieved by men 
have often done harm. All religious crises have done good." 
— Benjamin Constant, De la Religion^ I. chap. i. No. 5. 



LET us sum up, in a few brief words, the results 
of our labor. In the first place, we have recog- 
nized in pagan religions the universal law of trans- 
formation, which, far from leaving religion as the one 
unchangeable thing upon earth, develops it constantly 
by modifying it according to the needs of souls. At 
the same time we have demonstrated in history this 
development of the religious and moral world, which 
has rendered possible the adherence of Jews and Gen- 
tiles to the words of Christ. 

We have seen Christianity appear in the bosom of 
humanity, hungry for truth, thirsty for religious life. 
The aim of Christianity is the reign of God in the 
conscience by the sole power of love. The love of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 255 

the heavenly Father towards His children awakens in 
us love towards Him and towards our brethren, 
whether through the pardon which He offers to the 
repentant sinner, or through the new life into which 
we are initiated by the Spirit, and which has for its 
law the infinite progress, the eternal growth, of the 
soul towards God.* In these essential features of 
Christianity we have recognized a universal religion, 
which excludes no human being, and wishes to elevate 
us all as high as possible ; an inexhaustible, eternal 
religion, enabling man to approach constantly nearer 
the goal, but never to surpass or even to reach it, 
because this goal is perfection ; finally, a religion 
purely spiritual, bound to no institution, church, 
clergy, ritual, history, code, discipline, or dogmatic 
system, but addressing itself directly to every con- 
science, in order to regenerate it by truth and love. 
Such, in our eyes, is absolute Christianity, the Chris- 
tianity of Jesus ; such is the imperishable theme, the 
eternal hymn, on which each epoch, each national 
genius, each church, each powerful individuality writes 

* Perhaps it is useful to point out how much more profound 
and moral is this truly evangelical notion of pardon than the 
common or orthodox idea, which insists far less upon the 
evil from which Jesus wishes to deliver us than upon the 
chastisement endured by him in our stead — a vestige of the 
religion of terror, in which impunity seems the essential goal 
to be reached, even more than love and moral regeneration. 



256 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

a new variation ; each of these variations being by 
no means an arbitrary composition, but faithfully 
translating into a new language the cry of the con- 
science, the perpetual aspiration of the soul towards 
heaven, of the children of God towards their Father. 

The basis being established, there rises from it, now 
successively, now all at once, different transformations 
of Christianity, of which each is a partial and unequal 
development of this or that phase of primitive Chris- 
tianity ; by this very fact each remains inferior to the 
first conception, although responding more directly to 
certain particular states of mind, and to the necessi- 
ties of the moment. 

Among these transformations the first in point of 
time was a recoil. Judaical Christianity started from 
this true idea, that Jesus had not come to abolish 
Mosaism ; that is, to make a tabula rasa^ and begin 
anew the intellectual and religious life of the human 
race ; but it did not comprehend, or only half com- 
prehended, that he had wished to spiritualize all that 
he found. The Judaists, incapable of rising to the 
height of pure spirituality and Christian liberty, did 
not know how to free themselves from the Israelitic 
notion of an external law, and preserved erroneously 
the accessory ideas of a last judgment, attended with 
great physical manifestations of the power of God 
upon the earth, such as the second advent of Jesus, 
and his reign of a thousand years. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 257 

This first and baleful limitation of universal Chris- 
tianity met with a speedy contradiction in the Hellen- 
istic Christianity of St. Stephen. It was a necessary 
reformation : a revindication of the spirituality of 
Jesus ; a reaction against the yoke of the Mosaic law, 
and against the exclusive monopoly of the temple of 
Jehovah. This glorious development of primitive 
universality, suddenly arrested by the martyrdom of 
the first reformer, was resumed with new energy by 
the witness of his violent death, the implacable adver- 
sary of external legality, the irresistible champion of 
interior religion, or faith. Armed with this sole prin- 
ciple, which had issued directly from the thought and 
heart of Jesus, but which had not, hitherto, been suffi- 
ciently well understood, Paul preached to humanity 
the religion of conscience, that is, the universal reli- 
gion, and converted the best minds of the pagan world. 
Unfortunately, however, through an excessive hatred 
of the external law, and the privileges of Israel, he 
was led to deny to the human conscience rights derived 
from God himself, and so glided insensibly towards 
divine arbitrariness or predestination. 

The church turned away from this formidable 
genius. Under the auspices of Peter a compromise 
was effected between Judaizing Christianity and that 
of Paul ; a third party, whence issued by degrees 
Catholicism ; a third party, inconsequent, illogical, 

17 



258 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

perhaps nearer the truth in one sense than the two 
systems from which it sprang, with regard to what 
was extreme in their tenets, but inferior in grandeur, 
in spirituality, in liberality, in power over souls, to the 
Christianity of St. Paul. 

Outside of the double current, represented by the 
W'ords law and faith, had arisen another great Chris- 
tian power, the Greek mysticism of John — that is to 
say, the alliance of a Christianity which was all love 
with the contemplative philosophy of Alexandria. 
Here the fundamental sentiment of Christianity, the 
love of God and of men, escapes equally the too legal 
prejudices of the Judaizing Christians, and the too 
dogmatic inclinations of the disciples of Paul. But 
this sentiment is found allied to the theology of the 
Incarnate Word, that is to say, to the favorite theories 
of the Judeo-Greek science of the age. John is the 
point of contact of Christianity with the rising Gnos- 
ticism and the changeable philosophies of the East. 
He remained the favorite Evangelist of souls dreamy 
and emotional, rather than positive and logical. 

Rome represented in the ancient world the principle 
of authority, force, law, the letter ; and, furthermore, 
she was the centre in which had come to be blended all 
natural religions. When the Roman world made an 
irruption into the church, these religions brought with 
them nearly all their material, and their naturalistic 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 259 

tendencies besides. Everything was taken literally ; 
the cultus became emblematic and theatrical ; the 
metaphors became symbols, then rites ; and these 
rites, miraculous realities : the spirituality of Jesus, 
Christian monotheism, received 'repeated wounds from 
innumerable assaults. 

Little by little, among the theologians whom the 
church calls Fathers, as among those whom she con- 
demns under the name of heretics, two different ten- 
dencies became apparent. The one Occidental, ex- 
ternal, positive, expressing Itself habitually In Latin, 
relied almost always upon Rome (though occasionally 
resisting her), and arrived at ultra exactions, at ascetic 
rigors among the Montanists and with Tertulllan : 
therein were developed the love of order, the spirit of 
organization, and the need of governing. The other, 
Oriental, speaking Greek, was more speculative and 
more free, welcomed with greater liberality the good 
and the true, even among the pagans, but finally lost 
itself witli Gnostics and Origenists In the vague infini- 
tude of Asiatic reverie. 

There prevailed also among all the theologians and 
thinkers of the first centuries, whether Fathers or her- 
etics, Latins or Greeks, a great variety of types, liberty 
of theories, spontaneity and confusion. It would be a 
chimerical enterprise to seek, at this epoch, for unity 
of doctrine even among the Latin Fathers alone. 



26o FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

The intellectual life of Christianity was still too im- 
pulsive to fall into official uniformity, or even to con- 
ceive the idea of it. 

Finally, Constantine becomes a Christian, princi- 
pally from policy, but not v^ithout a sort of obscure 
and gross good faith : the empire imitates him, the 
church and the pagan state are mutually absorbed 
into each other : the emperor remains sovereign pon- 
tiff, and becomes the first pope : it is he alone who 
assembles, presides over, and closes the councils. 
Arius tries in vain and in an incoherent manner to 
resist the false piety which makes Jesus, in spite of 
himself, equal to the Father : he endeavors, illogically, 
even while worshipping the Son, to maintain his sub- 
ordination to the Father, which had been clearly and 
emphatically proclaimed by Paul. He struggles 
unsuccessfully against the movement of the age, and 
against Athanasius, who upholds with heroic obsti- 
nacy the contrary error. The Trinitarian dogma is 
formed : Jesus is lost in God. Already the need of a 
Mediator between the human soul and the Infinite 
fails to find satisfaction in the deified Christ. x\lready 
Mary begins to be called the Mother of God : for her, 
in the distance, is breaking the dawn of a career analo- 
gous to that which Christ has been made to accom- 
plish — a career which will end in the middle of the 
nineteenth century, when the Virgin shall have been 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 26 1 

declared more than human from the first moment of 
her being. 

In many respects the work of Constantine was a 
baneful deviation from true Christianity. Yet even 
under this form, so foreign to its point of departure, 
so contrary to its principle, as under all those forms 
in which it has been subsequently invested, Chris- 
tianity has never ceased to be : like the sun, which 
clouds may render invisible, but of which all the rays 
are never intercepted, it has continued, even when 
obscured, to do an immense, incalculable good to 
souls. It has been rightly said of Socrates that hu- 
manity has never lost what this great moralist gave it 
— the inclination and habit of self-judgment. Should 
this be less true of Jesus Christ? By no means. 
The most fantastic transformations, the most lamen- 
table aberrations of Christianity, have never extin- 
guished that eternal fire which it has kindled in the 
minds and consciences of men. From period to 
period, error has been able to veil for a time the 
Christian principle ; but inevitable reactions, glorious 
reforms, have always set it free. 

II. 

If we seek in the three great primitive forms of 
Christianity for the principle and origin of the actual 
chief divisions of the church, we come, by taking the 



262 FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 

facts on a high plane, and considering them from a 
general point of view, to the following results : — 

The theosophic Christianity of St. John, with his 
doctrine of the Word made flesh, and with his mystic 
language borrowed from the Platonists of Alexandria, 
remained the Oriental form of the religion of Jesus,' 
and ended in the Greek or Orthodox Church. 

Rome adopted Judaical Christianity, the sacerdotal 
hierarchy of Israel, its thousand prescriptive details, 
its external ndtus, its notion of sacrifice, mingling 
pagan with Jewish traditions: she accepted only in a 
very feeble measure the teaching and influence of St. 
Paul, to whom she preferred St. Peter, whose Chris- 
tianity is much more Judaizing than Pauline. Thus 
was formed the Catholicism which, inconsiderately 
enough, arrogates to itself the title of Apostolic, 
adding, however, another designation, which is per- 
fectly incontestable — that of Roman. 

Finally, Paul, in combating relentlessly external 
and legal religion, in bringing Christianity back into 
the profound domain of faith and conscience, became 
the apostle of all the heralds of Reform and of the 
Reformers of all epochs. It was in his Epistles that 
Faber Stapulensis, in 15 12, found the dogma which 
regenerated the c\-ixxxc\-i — the justification of ma7z, not 
by rites, nor by authority, but by inner and personal 
faith. It was in Paul that Luther met the decisive 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 263 

thought which made him a Protestant: ^^ The just 
shall live by faith,^^ Finally, it was from him that 
Calvin borrowed, in order to exaggerate it, the ex- 
treme doctrine of Paulinism — predestination. Thus 
Paul is not only the father of the numerous churches 
which emerged at his word from the bosom of pa- 
ganism, — he is also the father of all the reformed 
churches. 

Is it not evident that the danger, the destruction, 
perhaps, for each of these three divisions of Christen- 
dom, is in the exaggeration of their special principle 
of theosophy for the Greeks, of authority and formal- 
ism for the Catholics, and of dogmatism for the Protes- 
tants ? Is it not evident, from this very fact, that for 
each of these three churches the remedy and the safety 
consist in reinvigorating themselves at the common 
source, in lifting themselves to the oecumenical Chris- 
tianity of Jesus, in ascending from what has been par- 
tial and special to what was complete and universal, 
and, finally, in nourishing themselves, and living from 
broad and general truths rather than from particular 
doctrines ? 

We stop here, not without regret, yet with the hope 
of resuming and continuing this study at some future 
time. It is less necessary to recall the history of the 
variations of Christianity from the fourth century to 
the nineteenth, as during this period there is less 



264 TRANSFORMATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

room for serious misconceptions. The preceding is 
sufficient to show that, very far from being a stereo- 
typed system, or an unchangeable institution, the 
religion of Jesus is an organism full of life and fruit- 
fulness. 

Christianity under Constantine resembles those 
sacred trees of the pagan cults which ancient art 
represents as capriciously mutilated, decorated with 
fillets of purple or of byssus, with fantastic masks and 
mystic symbols. We should have liked to pursue our 
study to the great day when these venerable orna- 
ments fall on every side, and when the tree, pruned, 
full of new sap, rises higher than ever in its majestic 
and living nakedness, without any other adornment 
than its boughs covered with flowers and fruits. 

In this our day, the labor which pruned the tree in 
the sixteenth century has been resumed, in France 
and everywhere else, with an activity which disturbs 
many friends, and awakens illusive hopes in the minds 
of some adversaries : both are mistaken. Lop off the 
dead branches — the sap will only be more generous, 
the foliage more fresh and dense, the fruits more 
abundant and moi'e exquisite. The tree of life will 
not perish. Truth is mighty^ and will prevail. 

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